Dancing Task Journal

Week 1

After being given our task, I immediately knew what dance I ask going to use. I found "The Carlton dance" and bookmarked it to use as reference. I thought it was a good choice as it was funny (which I like) but also might be a challenge because of how much he moves about. 

I also tried looking at other videos ("Evolution of dance" and "Evolution of hip-hop dancing") because it showed a larger array of dance moves but I thought it was too difficult to choose which dance I wanted to use so I went with the Carlton Dance.

Week 2-4

I then began to search for a model. This was a more difficult task than I had assumed it would be as not many were rigged and a lot that were also costly. 

Week 4-8

I experimented with many but after having trouble finding a free rigged one, I began watching some tutorials so I was at least more comfortable with Maya. I found a channel on youtube dedicated to tutorials, tips and tricks for Maya so I watched a few.

Week 9

I was given some more basic models to practice with. They helped me become more used to maya and manipulating the 3D models. It was good practice and I was able to use the skills I had learnt watching the tutorial.

Week 10

I had finally found a free rigged model and began to animate it to match the video I had found prior. It was on this week that I had also tried importing an image sequence into Maya so it would be easier to use the video I chose as reference.

Week 12

This was the week where I had looked into render layers. This was mostly just to see how

The model was of Spider-girl/Gwen Stacey and at the time of writing this sentence (06/12/1997 09:19am) I have animated a considerable amount considering I had never used Maya prior to Week 9 of this project.  I will continue to animate Gwen Stacey using the Carlton Dance as reference.

Week 13 - 17

I have continued to animate my model and have looked into building a background stage. 

I have found some tutorials for building backgrounds and added the dancing video to the background of Maya to make copying the video easier to do frame by frame.

I have mostly just been using the rotation tool to change the positions of the body parts to match that of the dancer in the video. I've also been using the move tool to move the legs and feet.

I did encounter a problem when I was adjusting the position of the shoulders and had to take time fixing the problem I had. I ended up having to redo the movements for the shoulders and using different parts of the body to achieve the same effect.

28/06/2017

After receiving feedback I decided it would be better to restart from scratch and try using another 3D model and a different dance video to try to copy.

I decided on a a deadpool model but found it difficult to find one that was already rigged. After looking for quite a while, I decided to bite the bullet and try to learn how to rig one myself.

I had some trouble so I decided to look up some tutorials and look at some forums for some guidance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5nsVg2BlGY 

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/files/GUID-6CAEA6C2-D4F9-422D-8E0F-522171B47C35-htm.html

These tutorials were pretty helpful so I felt confident trying to rig a model myself. I had my model and I was getting familiar with the controls so I opened up Maya, opened up my Deadpool model and started.

It was a very time consuming for a beginner like me and took 2 days to look at tutorials, get familiar with the controls and then I had to restart again and again as the rigging wasn't working properly. It was satisfying to do as I was getting closer with each attempt, the problem was that I had put joints in slightly wrong parts of the model so it would lead to weird, stretched distortions whenever I tested the movement of the rig. I would have continued but after considering how close the deadline was, I decided to just try finding another model - one that was rigged this time. I eventually settled on a model of The Flash.

I was familiar with another model created by the same user on this site (the one I had used previously, Spider-gwen). So using it wasn't much of a problem.

The dance I chose was the evolution of dance video. I thought it would be easier as it was one continuous shot of more than one dance so it would add variety without making it difficult to have to guess how to move a body part as I could see everything. This turned out to be a good idea as I could see the whole body of the dancer.

I decided to use the environment that I had already created for the Deadpool model as I didn't want to waste time making a new one with a deadline so close. The only things I didn't make myself was the lamp and the bed; however, I textured everything myself and added my own lights to make it seem more authentic.

I got to work doing the actual animation and it went pretty smoothly. I had some issues with one the shoulders rotating the way it wasn't supposed to but as I had already encountered this issue before, I knew I only had to undo and change some things to quickly deal with it. The whole thing took about a week to animate and I was working pretty hard each day so I was satisfied with the result.