This is so exciting and draining. I have learned so much and have had a great opportunity to learn and work with others throughout this course. I took and combining many the skills from, sprite sheets, Maya low poly modeling, Rigging, animating, Unity, Zbrush, and slamming them all together in this production. I’m very happy to say that Claire and Darren will be helping in making this production something that will reach others.

So what exactly is it? It’s an AR animation that will be geo located here on WPI campus. The new Mural over at the CC/ Innovation Center area will be brought to life. I will be doing the animation that will play on on the wall through an AR experience, Claire will ensure that all the AR mechanics are working. Darren will be creating PR and working his magic with the camera and maybe assist with some cool FX with this video editing wizardry.

The process so far, has changes so much it is not even in the same wheel house of skills. I originally made and pitched a shotty story board that was ever evolving because I wasn’t sure of what the time line was going to be. I then started to make low poly models auto rigged them and started trying to make a scene with them to do animations through the graph editor. I would them render it out and do hand drawing frames over it. The issues I ran into with Maya proved to me that It was going to take way too much time to get these sub optimal rigs to not only move. but read well. I checked out some tutorials and saw how to do flash animations in photoshop and started working on it.

I’ve had great success so far and will continue with this approach. each character is broken up into “icons” I then give each icon a layer and use groups to do the same things that parents and children are in maya animation constraints. It’s pretty ingenious. I then set each frames pose and BAM animations. well, it’s not that simple but it gives you the gist of what is happening.
I’m going to show off the low poly model and auto rig I abandoned and the new flash style sprites with one of them being posed for a test frame.

Overall I think that for a rough. this will be amazing and will allow for some each paint overs and fixes .