Silent Comedy Animation + Evaluation.

For this project, my task was to produce a 60 second character animation, following the theme of silent comedy and slapstick.  I had to create a character that could apparently think, decide, pick something up, drop something, walk, climb, trip, slip and fall, by creating a suitable CAT rig and using the skin modifier in 3ds Max.

Towards the start of this project, I strongly focused on learning various modelling and animating techniques from tutorials given to us throughout the project, as well as coming up with the general main plot for my animation, and choosing the character that I wanted to use. I then started following more of these tutorials, using my character concept and drawings to help me create my final work.

I chose to create a geeky male character for my animation, in a scenario that a geek would perhaps not be comfortable in usually – playing basketball. I wanted my character to get angry whilst failing at getting a basket, and then get hit in the face by the ball and slipping over (like in a typical slapstick comedy).

I briefly looked at some slapstick comedy towards the beginning too, such as Charlie Chaplin and Warner Bros, but I feel I didn’t do as much research into the theme as much as I would have liked, and tended to focus on the animation and modelling more. I think if I had have planned and researched better, my project may have been more thorough and successful, however I am quite pleased with my outcome to say I am not particularly interested in the field of character design and animation as a career.

I spent a lot of time of this project on modelling and texturing the character itself before any of the animation or environment was started. I found the modelling of the character quite time consuming, but pretty straightforward when following the tutorials I had. However, the UVW unwrap modifier was something that took me a while to get my head around at first, in particular the peel tool. I also found when painting my character in Mudbox, that it was quite hard to make my texture map as neat and tidy as I would have liked, so ended up doing the rough outline in this software, before tweaking it properly in Photoshop to get rid of visible seams and mistakes.

I then moved onto another complex part of the project – CAT rigging and the skin modifier. I found making my own CAT rig quite simple to understand in 3ds Max. The skin modifier and the “edit envelopes” option, however, I found quite frustrating and still did not get my character’s skin to move as I would like it to when I animated the bones. For instance, when he bent over, the shorts would cut into the t-shirt no matter how many times I tried to improve the envelope settings.

I then created my simple environment and props in the scene, before animating it all within this environment. This included a road, a house, a basketball hoop, basketball, dustbin, etc.  I tried to make this environment as simple and as similar to the cartoony style of my character as possible.

Overall, I am quite happy with the outcome of this project in terms of my limited time schedule and other commitments in other areas of my pathway. Although, currently, I am not as interested in animation and characters as other areas such as visualisation and environment design, I feel I have learned some important skills throughout this project, such as rigging and UVW unwrapping, and it is something I could consider learning more of in the future.