Lab 5: Creating an Animation Loop with Music
IDS252: 3D Animation, Spring 2016

Goals

• Continue practice using keyframes
• Learn how to import and respond to sound.
• Learn about path animation, skeletons, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics.
• Deliverables: A 10 second animation loop that responds to a 10 second sound loop. Place in the designated folder on cs-render. See Evaluation Sheet (pdf).

Files and Folders

• When you create a new project for the animation, place it on the cs-render drive in the folder: \IDS252Sp16\Lab5\MayaProjects\your_name. Be sure to follow the directions for setting animation parameters.
• When you have completed the lab, please move your final animation over to the folder: \IDS252Sp16\Lab5\FinalAnimations\
• Make sure that the name of your final animation is named in a similar manner as in previous labs.

Reading

• Experiment more with camera cuts but, before you do, you should read about the "line of action" and maintaining continuity. See chap 8 in the readings in folder \IDS252Sp16\IDS252Resources\booksExcerpts\StoryBoarding
• If you do want to use camera cuts, you might want to organize your shots using Maya's camera sequencer and ubercam. Go to Maya help to read about these. Otherwise, you must manually do a separate batch render for each camera sequence.
• To learn about the power of sound to help tell a story, read Designing a Movie for Sound by Randy Thom

Digital Tutors

The following tutorials are suggested:

• Introduction to Maya 2016. Do lessons:
  • Lesson 59: Path Animation
  • Lesson 49: Building Joints
• Introduction to Rigging in Maya 2015: If you are really interested in rigging, take a look at this. Otherwise, feel free to skip this!
• Quick Start to Animation in Maya Volume 2
  • Lesson 3: Path Animation This gives a quick introduction to path animation
  • Lesson 2: Animating with constraints Constraints provide powerful but simple way to control/constrain behavior. These include parent constraints, orient constraints, point, constraints, etc. This tutorial demonstrates using a parent constraint.
• Maya 2012 Rigging Reference Library Deformers Deformers provide powerful but simple way to animate or alter the geometry of objects. Examples include such things as parent constrains, bend deformers, squash and stretch deformers, etc. This tutorial is a great overview of many different deformers. A more recent tutorial on the lattice deformer is:
  Lesson 19: Deforming objects with Maya's lattice deformer - Maya 2015

Maya Tutorials - Path Animation for Airplane, and Rigging a Mechanical Arm

In Maya, go to Help → Tutorials → Maya Tutorials. Click on the link Getting Started with Maya 2015. In the contents, click on Getting Started with Maya, and then Animation. Do the following lessons:

• Lesson 3: Path animation. You will need the file PathAnim.mb. Download and place it into your project's scenes folder.
• Lesson 4: Inverse Kinematics.You will need the file IK_MechArm.mb. Download and place it into your project's scenes folder.

The above tutorials will not be collected but are strongly recommended!

10 Second Animation Loop

• Project Setup: Your project should have settings as described in the directions here.

• Music Assignments: When these become available, you will be able to find your 10 second music loops in the folder \IDS252Sp16\Lab5\MusicLoops. Your assignment will be made once the music files are available:

  Music File	Animator		Music File	Animator
  TW_loop_audio.aif	Chris		GR_audio_loop.aif	Brandon
  AG_loop_audio.aif	Matthew		KD_Audio_Loop.aif	Marcus
  BH_AudioLoop.aif	Navarre		KS_loopaudio.aif	Thomas
  AL_AudioLoop.aif	Daisuke		KST_loop_audio.aif	Emily
  Cf_loop_audio.aif	James		SH_loop_audio_final.aif	Kara
  audioloop_IRE.aif	Bryan		Sr_audio_file_final.aif	Alastair
  ESp_Loop_audio.aif	Mitchell		AB_Loop_Audio.aif	Jared
  EST_audio_loop.aif	Rufei		EST_audio_loop.aif	Alex
  TW_loop_audio.aif	David

  You may select another music file or swap with someone. The only requirements are 1) each music file must be assigned to at least one but no more than 2 animators and 2) you must get approval from instructor before making a change.

• Loading Music into Maya:

  • Copy your sound file into your project and place it into the "sound" folder.
  • Below are the key things that you need to do to work with sound:
    • If you haven't done so already, remember to set the frames-per-second (fps) to 30 and the "Playback Speed" to "Real-time (30fps)". Note, if you don't select "real-time", you won't be able to hear the sound.
    • To load in a sound file, go to File;Import... from Maya's main menu. Select the sound file you copied into your project folder (if your project is not set, Maya will place you in the wrong folder. You should always set the project).
    • To see the sound wave in the timeline at bottom of Maya window, right click on the timeline, choose Sound, and select the name of your sound file.
    • You need to expand the time range slider so you can see the entire sound wave. To do this, right click on the time slider and choose "Set Range to → Sound Length". The length should be very close to 300 frames assuming the sound is 10 seconds long. If it is close but not exactly 300 frames, use whatever length the sound is. If it is really different than 300 frames, let the instructor know so you can be given a different sound.
    • More detailed directions for importing sound files can be found in the Maya Help (do a search on "Add audio to your animation").

• Creating Your 10 Second Animation Loop: Listen to the sound multiple times to develop a sense of the movement and feeling of the music. Based on this, create an animation as a response to the music (remember, there is no right or wrong). As in the last lab, your animation should be a loop, i.e. it's end should transition seamlessly back into the beginning. Be prepared to discuss how you applied at least several of the animation principles listed below. Refer to UW Principles for detailed explanations.

  Squash & stretch Anticipation Staging Follow-through Overlapping action Slow-in, slow-out Arc vs linear motion

  Secondary action Timing Exaggeration Knowledge of technique Observation and translation Appeal Imagination

• Combining Sound and Animation: When you render the frames in Maya, the sound is not attached. You must combine the frames and the sound separately. To add sound to the final quicktime animation, you will need to load the sound file into Adobe Premier along with the image frames. The frames are dragged down to the video track and the audio needs to be dragged down to the audio track. Make sure the video and audio are properly aligned. Generate the quicktime as you did in the last lab. (See directions)

Evaluation

Before class on the due date listed above, place your final animation (in quicktime format and with sound attached) on cs-render in the folder \IDS252Sp16\Lab5\FinalAnimations. Your Maya project should be in the folder \IDS252Sp16\Lab5\MayaProjects. Animations will be graded based on the evaluation questions discussed during the critique (see link at top).

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