Animation Update

There is something I forgot to mention within this blog, which I feel needs to be. When I started animating my character, over a week ago, I realised how difficult the walk cycle is, and also how time consuming it would be to animate the walk cycle across the whole kitchen. So, I decided to edit the story slightly, and modelled a skateboard.

 A render image of the start of the animation, showing the mouse on the skateboard.



The mouse starts on the skateboard, and loses it towards the end, when he catches fire on the hob.

 A render image of a frame where the mouse loses his skateboard.

There is still a walk cycle, towards the end of the animation, just at a much smaller scale than first planned.

 A render image showing the mouse during its walk cycle, towards the end of the animation.

As you have probably noticed from the above screenshots, I have also, finally, added eyes and a mouth. I originally wanted to create a blend shape to act as the mouth, of which I would be able to edit throughout the animation, to show pain (hob fire) and happiness (reaches the cheese). Unfortunately, I had forgotten how to create a blend shape, from our lesson on it back in October. I tried to find tutorials online, but they were not much help. A face rig was out of the question, way to completed for me. So, once the animation was complete, I thought to myself, how am I going to show emotion? I then, very cleverly, decided to extrude a few faces on the head of the mouse, to form the mouth.

I also added a blue texture to two faces, extruded those faces, and added a black texture within the blue one, to show eyes. Unfortunately, this means that the mouse is constantly smiling, even when he catches fire on the hob, but it still does the trick. From this, I have learnt to pay more attention when being taught new tools, and I have since learnt a bit more about blend shapes. 

I decided to show the happy face at the end of the animation, when the mouse reaches the cheese. I zoomed in the camera towards the face, to further emphasise his happiness, his emotion.