Introduction

Using Autodesk Maya to create and animate a robot. The process is separated into two sections. The first section is the creation of the 3D model and the animation that takes the individual parts and assembles them to form the robot. The second section is the process of adding a skeleton to the robot (rigging) and making a dance animation. Both sections have a small ~20second video.

Primitives-Assemble

This section briefly describes the process undertaken to produce an animation. from the initial stage of pre-production and planning to the end result. The animation is showcasing a self-assembling robot and attempts to produce realistic and meaningful motions throughout, using animation principles and animation tools.

• Pre-production and planning: Using sketches at the very beginning was a powerful way of narrowing down the ideas for the character to be used. It helped forge the idea of the character, the body parts required, the motion those body parts would provide and bring the character to life. One of the sketches is shown in Figure 1.

  In addition to sketches, scripts were created in order to describe the motion that I had in mind and try to set up a basic structure for the work.

  

• Challenges and Highlights: In the process of creating an immersive animation, a number of different techniques and animation processes were used. Examples include Set-driven keys, Post-infinity curves, Graph editor manipulation, Constraints, Disney's Animation Principles, and Camera Motion smoothing.

  Set driven keys were used to extend and contract the robots extension parts shown in Figure 2.

  Post-infinity curves were used to animate the gears of the robot's "heart" for non-stop motion.

  Constraints added to separate body parts, so that they follow the motion of others such as the hand following the extension of the other body parts without breaking, shown in Figure 4.

  Using Disney's animation principle to add anticipation when legs and arms contract in the animation, they first extend showing the something will happen, and when they contract they do in a spring-like manner. In Figure 3, anticipation is demonstrated by the initial rise of the graph, and then the spring dampening effect is shown in the oscillations close to the end.

  

  

  

Dance-Animation

This section briefly describes the process of rigging and the process of creating the sequence of animation of the robot getting up from the ground, doing 3 dance moves, and lastly a finishing pose as an outro. In addition, I added simple textures to the robot to make him more appealing.

• Pre-production and planning: As with the first section of the project, some preparation before I dive straight into Maya was carried out. First of all selecting the music that the robot would dance to, then creating a small animation script and lastly describing the location helped identify some very simple props I could use to make the atmosphere and the look of the animation better.
• Weighted rigging: Initially, when starting to add joints to the structure of the character, I came across an obstacle. I modeled every other part of the character as separate objects except the hand. The hand was a single object. I started working in adding weighted rig bones to the hand (Figure 5) but shortly realized that having weighted skinned joints parented under unskinned joints would become a very unstable way of working, and would become an issue in the future. I soon deleted the hand and created a new model splitting the fingers into many different objects (Figure 6) to keep the consistency of the model throughout.

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• Inverse Kinematics: There were two major ways to rig the model and add motion. Either Forward kinematics or inverse kinematics. Inverse kinematics initially seemed easier and simpler, just move one control and the joints will animate accordingly. Soon after starting to animate, I realized that the motion inverse kinematics provide is limited and most of the time unnatural.  This led me to do more research before continuing, and after some reading and rethinking, I changed the arms of the robot to forward kinematics and kept the legs of the robot as inverse kinematics. Inverse kinematics are very good when you want to animate something attached to something else, e.g. the legs to the ground, that way you can move your character but the legs will still be stuck correctly to the ground.
• Controls and Cleanup: Animating a skeleton turned out to be very messy and often confusing. Therefore after looking at other peoples work and researching basic principles online, I started cleaning up my model and adding controls to the joints that I wanted to animate Figures 8 and 9 show the control circles and control points attached to the joints that would be animated, and Figure 7 shows the hierarchy of objects and bones when they were all renamed and structured cleanly.

  

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• Lastly, the simple creation of the dance floor with 8 different colored lights and illuminating square blocks for the Robot to dance on is shown in Figure 10.