Finally, after 2 and a half long weeks, it's complete! I wanted to animate an olympic dive but make the ending funny, and voila! I came up with this :)
Assignment Description:
We had to animate a character jumping off a diving board...
Completion Time and Render Time:
I worked on this for a really long time...at least 10 days [which is long for me!], working about 4-5 hours each day. I kept showing this to my teacher, and he kept giving me corrections after corrections to make...but when I look at what I first started with and look at the final result...let's just say it's a HUGE difference!
As usual, rendered in mental ray with the light rig I created [just 1 directional light and a bunch of spotlights to act as fill lights]. The total render time was about 4-5 hours [it was about 500 frames].
Composited in After Effects and edited in FCP [Final Cut Pro].
How It Was Made:
Alright, so I first watched one of the videos of the men's 3 metre springboard olympic diving event...like a hundred times! Then I added the key poses for the animation and checked the timing. Then I added inbetweens, follow through and secondary movement/action [facial expressions, finger movement, etc.]. I ran into lots of problems with the timing though, because I didn't really spend too much effort in adjusting my timing in the beginning, so I had to suffer later on. Only when I had finished with my inbetweens, then I realized the timing is too fast in the beginning and too slow when he's jumping off the board. So I selected the keyframes and scaled them up, and then the hands and legs started to move all around the place! It was very frustrating. I finally had to create 2 scenes: 1 scene of the character walking up and getting ready to dive, and another scene of him actually diving [I copied the camera positions and attributes over to the other scene]. The diving part was also really frustrating, because I first animated the double somersault using IK [I know, it's a stupid thing to do], and later on I realized that it would look better with FK, so I had to animate the jump ALL OVER AGAIN with FK! Well, we learn from our mistakes right?
Final Words:
Thanks to Josh Burton for the super flexible and amazing Morpheus Rig!
Hope you like it!
And please follow me at the side if you like what you see :)
Thanks!
