3D Animation – Evaluation
The aim for this project was to create a 3D animation to suit a sound of our choice, using Autodesk Maya.
For this I decided to create a beer can and record the sound of a metal can being dropped onto a desk.
To create the can I first created a cylinder object for the main body of the can. I then made a Torus object for the rim, both at the top and at the bottom of the can. I then used a series of extruded cubes to create a ring pull shape and smoothed the edges to give it a rounder shape. After this i grouped the objects together in order for it to act as a single object. For the skin I downloaded a picture of the Stella Artois logo and designed the rest of the skin based on a can. I had to refresh and adjust the skin several times before the location of the logo and font was correct.
Once i’d created my can I created a plane and rotated it onto a slant. I then created a group of cylinders to act to provide greater interaction with my can. I then assigned new materials for these shapes, using Lambert. Once my objects were created I created an active rigid body for my can and a passive rigid body for my obsticles and floor. I then created a gravity field, allowing for my can (active) to be affected by gravity and for it to bounce off my objects (passive).
I then aligned my camera and rendered my footage.
Once this was done I imported the video into Adobe Premiere. This didn’t work however as the file format was incompatable with Premiere and was displayed as a blank screen. I then changed the codec I was using for my Maya render several times to find one that would work but they were all displayed as a distorted image once imported into Premiere. I then noticed that I could re-encode the source footage using windows movie maker, at the expense of quality reduction. The .WMV format worked in Premiere without fault.
I then used a directional microphone to record the sounds of a can hitting a hard surface and truncated these sound clips within Premiere to correspond with the footage.
When this was done I exported the footage within Premiere with the Cinepack encoder to reduce file size, resulting in my final piece.
In my opinion this piece could have been longer with a lot more depth. However my limited knowledge of Maya restricted my creativity as I did not know fully how to convey my ideas within the program.
