Today, Seth, DJ, and I completed our two week animation project with the prompt “Dance Off! It all comes down to a Dog hoola-hooping and a Break Dancing Cat! Who will win??” Our project was rushed near the end, mainly with the positions of our characters, the fact that the dog is floating, and how almost everything we had on our storyboard wasn’t in the final animation.
The part I worked on for our project was everything related to the dog. One dynamic we thought was funny and wanted to keep is have the dog modelled based on a 2nd grade drawing of a dog while the cat was modelled after an actual cat. This was something we decided on after we were done with the storyboard and luckily we pulled through with that models wise. Textures weren’t exactly as realistic as we wanted, but they still got the job done.
One thing I wanted to give the dog was ear physics, but unfortunately I had to get rid of them since they were causing some issues that weren’t possible to fix from the student’s and teacher’s knowledge. The first issue is that they didn’t exactly behave like they were supposed to, not being affected by movement or rotation and still drooping the same way each time. Another issue, the one that caused us to remove it entirely, was trying to mess with them in animation caused the program to crash consistently.
I’m extremely happy with how the animation for the dog getting the hoola-hoop and holding it up turned out. I tried showing and explaining it to the teacher, but she ended up walking off while I was still talking, so that was a bit unfortunate. I think my favorite part of the animation is how the hoola-hoop gets dragged with the force over to the dog, and the collision causes the hoop to jiggle and the dog’s arm to be pushed back. Another thing I liked was the use of camera trickery here. From this angle you cannot tell that the arm is actually detached from the dog’s body (as seen below).
Then to end it off, we got all of our animations and work into one scene, where DJ put it all together, put it all in after effects, and then I polished a few audio timings and gave feedback with how it looked. Then we finally finished it and uploaded the video, only a day late!
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