Animating my Fish on Maya

We were set some work to complete over the two weeks by Robin which was to use the skills that we had learnt when animating the Star Wars Death Star turret. We were going to use the Lynda tutorials again, which I was quite happy about as I feel, so far, that Lynda has taught me a lot.

Once I had opened up the tutorial, I was in a state of disbelief, we would be going back to the fishes that we did in the fist homework assignment and animating them. This made me worried, I added a touch of originality to my fish, making the end result different to everyone else. I thought though, that I may as well give it a go and try my hardest in getting this thing to work, That's how I learn best.

I started to practice using "joints" on a cylinder.

At the beginning of tutorial, the guy who was taking it taught us some key items in Maya on how to animate. We were going to be using a tool called "joints". This gives the object that we are animating a sense of feel, if we move the joints, the object will move along with it. You have to be quite specific on where you put the joints, so that they can move to place that you want them to.

The picture below shows me twisting a cylinder without any jagged ends. I already think that this is a much better and easier way to move a certain amount of an object. The only thing that you have to do is select one of the joints and move it in the direction that you want.

Movement on a cylinder.

I had to do this on the fish next. I got the joint and put it straight onto the fishes eye, all the while making sure that it was dead on in the middle. After selecting and placing it, I then have the option of placing another joint. As you can see from the picture below, I have ended up placing them in all the important positions, these include the fish's mouth, fins and tail.

Once this was completed I had to go to the smooth bind options and set it up so that all of the joints ran smoothly with a hitch. 

All the "joints" are in place.

The last thing that we had to do was to use the skin "Paint Skin Weights Tool". This is a simple but really effect way of making sure that the area that you animate is as small, or as wide as you want. For this project though, we are going to have small areas so that you can see the detail in the film.

This works exactly the same as a paint brush, you just paint what you want, if you would like to erase where an animation is gong to be, you change the value to 0 and paint away.

The "paint skin weights tool".

Provided below is the small animation that I did of the fish, I found this task quite simple and it only took me a small while to do, again the results could be better, but I am happy to work on this as I did enjoy using all the different tools at my disposal.