Tangotown

Beautiful Fish

Since school has started I have been working on a 3D animated fish. It took me roughly a month to get this fish modeled, rigged, and animated. A lot of this project showed me how much work has to go into just one little animation. It made me realize why it takes a long time to get an animated film done. I wanted to do this project because I was anxious to learn how to rig and animate the fish. Last year we never really did much animation, it was more move a ball, which was good for starters but didn't excite me very much.

Pre Project and Maya 2016

I started with a drawing of the fish on just a piece of paper. I wanted to get an idea of what the fish would look like. I took my drawing and put it on the scanner and scanned it onto my

computer. I then took the image and put it on Maya 2016. I made a cube and made it x-ray to the image in the back and started moving the vertexes to align a rough outline of what it looked like. If you click the number 3 button it smooths out the fish and makes it not look boxy.

I started the fun process of rigging and  painting weights on the fish. I honestly did not mind the process. Painting the skin weights is there when you start to move the joints and some other weird part would move that you don't want to move.  Like if I wanted to move the fin of the fish and the eye starts to move. Painting the skin weights gets rid of that problem. If the weight is white where you don't want it you get rid of that wight and turn it black to get rid of the white. i ran into some problems, one of the weights on my fish would not go away at all. I just kept messing with the skin weight settings and eventually it finally worked.  Sometimes weights would come back and I would have to erace them over and over again. Once all of you skin weights a good and ready to go you can start animating your fish.

Final Part

Texturing the fish was a pretty easy process. I used a new window editor called the UV editor. The UV editor has the fish when it is unfolded. If you unfold the fish you can see you fish almost perfectly in 2D. If you take a screenshot of the uv editor fish and bring it into Photoshop you can start coloring it. Once I was done coloring it I just added a favorite material phong and set it to an image of the UV editor I took and colored on.

The final piece of the puzzle is adding a simple motion path on the fish.  I just did a short little circle motion path, to attach it you just go into the outliner in the window tab and click on the locator and curve, and the go to the constrain tab and add to motion path.

Conclusion

This project was my most favorite I have done in animation class. I enjoyed pretty much all of it. There were some things that I could have probably done better. The way  I did my fin was I did extruding on the side of the fish. It just made it more annoying to get the type of fin that I wanted. But in the end I love the way that my fin had turned out! I think if I made my fish a little more fat and not as skinny as it was the fish would look a lot better.