Final video:
The criteria for my animation are:
-Having one robot pick up the other one and make it look convincing.
-Have the roboter rig look at the camera at the end of the video.
-Using appropriate lighting.
My robot from the midterm:
The roboter rig that I found online:
The animation would be short and sweet, but I wanted it to symbolize the relationship between old and new futuristic technology.
The robot that I used in my midterm did not require any editing and I used the same animation as I did then. The only difference is that I had to move the starting position of one robot from the middle of the grid to somewhere out in front of the robot.
The biggest problem that I had with the roboter rig that I found online was that I could not move the fingers using the rotator tool, but I soon found a way around that by selecting the joints in the attributes window and using the center mouse button to increase and decrease the values thereby allowing them to move back and forth.
The next problem I ran into was making the roboter rig grab onto the other robot. Since I could not parent the roboter's hand to the other robot, I decided to just move my robot into place every key frame that the roboter rig moved. This was a long and tedious process, but in the end I think it was well worth the effort.
Once I had the basic animation set up, I had to decide what kind of lighting to use. I tried to use the lighting from the tesla coil on my robot's head, but as good as it looked, I could not see what my robot was doing. I then tried to put a spot light directly over my robot's head, but then when the roboter rig bent over, it blocked out the light, overshadowing my robot. I finally decided to have the spotlight come in at an angle thereby allowing my robot to be seen and creating some cool lighting effects. Also I used the lightning to create and eerie effect on the other robot's face after it stood up.
The camera movements were rather simple. Once I discovered that you could look through the camera, lining up the shots was easy. I originally wanted the roboter rig to walk into the frame, but since I could not get a walk animation to work, I simply used camera angles to gradually reveal the robot.
Looking back at this project and my animation one class, I learned that Maya is a very complicated program that does not always work the way you want it to. But when it does work, it can produce some amazing results.
Finally here is the storyboard that I used to create this animation:
