Create a brief character profile (e.g. 70’s soul singer, excited seven year old girl, dejected old man, etc.). Write a paragraph describing your character and specific details of how he/she moves. Now create a walk cycle that realizes this character. Use the generic rigged character model for this animation. The walk cycle should consist of two steps that can then be cycled to create a continuous walking motion. The text book and an in class tutorial both go over how to create a walk cycle in quite a bit of detail. They offer slightly different approaches and you can follow either. The emphasis in this assignment is to go beyond simply creating a walk cycle to creating one with a strong sense of personality. What is your walk cycle communicating? Think of LMA Effort qualities that are present in your walk and try to reflect them in your animation.
Specific grading criteria:
- Sense of weight
- Effective use of overlapping action (e.g. the “wave theory” or succession)
- Effectiveness of the characterization
- Quality of the timing of the motion, including placement of keys and adjustment of tangents
- Overall quality and appeal of piece
What to submit for the final project:
- rendered movie of the final animation
- your complete Maya project folder
- readme file
The basic submission procedure is the same as for all assignments.
- You will be submitting your entire Maya project folder. All additional files (e.g. the readme.txt and image files) should be in the root of that folder.
- N.B. Name your project folder as “A4YourName”, where “YourName” is your first and last name. This is how we will identify your submission.
- Include a brief readme file that identifies how you have met each of the requirements. You can also include any problems you could not resolve or particular features you would like us to notice. The file should be called “readme.txt” and included in the main project directory of your Maya files. Include your full name and student number in this file. This file should be brief (< 1 page).
- Be sure to include all the rendered images and movies listed above!
- Submit by following the instructions below. If you need to update the submission, just copy another folder and update your name with v2, v3, etc. We will only mark the last submission.
1. The "classes" folder should be automatically mounted. If it isn't, there should be a link on your desktop that you can double click on to mount the folders. The link is called “tcsserver.ucdavis.edu/Classes”.
2. In the classes folder, open"TCS 131".
3. Drag and drop your assignment into the "Submissions" folder. Make sure
it is named correctly, as described above.