Final Project

5/11/2020

This animation is continuing the ball's story from previous projects, except he evolves, like a Pokemon, into a thing that to my dismay actually looks like a minion. I didn't intend for that to happen. He finally concludes his story by crossing the finish line and reaching his cute house in the sky made of clouds. This was the project where I discovered Maya's toon shader and overused it for everything.

For this project, I didn't follow my original storyboard at all. I wanted to have more than one character because all my previous animations only had the one ball character, but I wanted to be realistic about what I could achieve so I made them simple blobs with circle-arms. Because of the simplicity, however, I wanted to rig the eyes very expressively because the characters didn't have any other features to convey emotion. I ended up only making one character because figuring out how to rig and animate one character's eyeballs was so difficult and time consuming that I didn't want to do it again...

Here's the finished animation:

I learned a lot from this project. I modeled everything in the animation myself and got the sound for the animations from freesound.org. I attempted rigging my own model for the first time, which was extremely difficult even though he only had one joint and could only essentially sway up or down and left or right. The most difficult part was rigging the pupils and setting up a controller for them to aim at. I had to re-rig everything several times and it was a horrible disaster, but I did it.

I also colored almost everything with Maya's Toon shader and outlined the background with the Toon outline. I did this because I wanted it to feel like the yellow protagonist was entering another world through the roller coaster and this cartoon world is his home domain where he can express himself (he comes to life and becomes more than just a ball). The only things not shaded with the Toon Shader are the building and the roller coaster cart from a previous project.

I used several principles of animation for this assignment.

Squash and Stretch

The character moves only through bouncing and sliding and his body squashes and stretches with him

Anticipation

The character's pupils getting larger, the large shadow that is covering the character, and the camera staying on the character anticipates the house in the sky.

Appeal

I hope the main character was cute and appealing. I also hope the soft edges to all the homes, especially the puffy cloud house, was appealing.