Project 6: Python Scripting

4/24/2020

For this animation, I made modifications to this tutorial animation series on Python scripting in Maya. I made my animation reminiscent of cool ranch Doritos. Everything shown in the video is generated by one Python script. When you run the script all the key frames for the animation are set according to the start and end times on the time slider (this animation had 240 frames to make a 10 second animation) and a UI box will pop up to allow the user to input the number of shapes (this animation has 50).

The changes I made to the tutorial animation were:

changing the hexagons into triangles and changing the central shape to an icosahedron instead of a sphere
changing the colors of the shapes to make the triangles look like Doritos and the central icosahedron reminiscent of a shiny Cool Ranch Doritos bag
I added additional random rotations to each chip
I added x and y rotations to the central icosahedron and made it scale larger and smaller to the same beat as the expansions of the chips around it

It's not that noticeable, but there is a point light in the icosahedron and a directional light to the right of everything. I attempted to render this animation, foolishly thinking my old laptop could handle rendering a measly 10-second video, but boy was I wrong! It failed horribly, with the video for some reason coming out black and white and super distorted.