The research I have done for my Final Thesis on understanding the principles of animation for the 3D world, helped me a lot in executing this project.
However, the areas I need improvement in is the timing of it all.
Part V: Paul (Ice-cream vendor) hands Leah the Ice cream.
I have been animating Leah in a separate Maya scene and not in the scene that contains the environment with all the textures. I figured it would be easier to animate Leah and import her onto the main environment scene so that my computer doesn’t freeze or hang as the main environment scene is already heavy because of all the textures and models saved on it.
Problems I faced in this scene:
- As I have been working on Leah’s animation separate from the main scene, the ice cream handed over to her appears out of nowhere. I need to make Paul hand over that ice cream to her when I import this animation onto the main environment scene.
- Since I have imported Paul onto the scene, with an already parented ice creamin his hand. I am unable to un-parent or parent a new element to Paul. The file shows an error when I tried to do that. (Error: cannot parent ref)
- I am having trouble using Maya Constraint on the ice cream and Leah’s grab onto it.
- Without the constraint, the fingers are passing through the ice cream cone when she brings the hand down.
- When I applied the Parent constraint by making the Ice cream parent to the hands or the hands as a parent to the ice cream, the whole animation done before is getting effected.
- As seen in the following image, the hands are still supposed to be behind when Leah sees this ice cream ready for her.
- But when I parent the hand to the Ice cream or vice versa, the poses set before parenting the hand to the ice cream, is getting effected and her hand is stretched like shown in the following image for the whole of animation.
- I mailed Luke to help me out of this predicament, and while I await his reply, I am trying to set keyframes for each consecutive frame.
I tried overcoming the problem by setting keyframes to every frame from the moment Leah grabs the ice-cream, but it is going to be a longer than necessary process to work on.
Shraddha Mithinti 