Rethinking my idea

At first I was seriously considering creating a model, rigging and then animating the rigged model for my final project. To be honest I wasn't confident in being able to handle it all and I think I should just animate and animate alone. It's been brought to my attention that A: an animation project could make for a good final project provided I put the work in and B: working on the three things would leave me with three not so refined skills rather than one skill that could impress employers.

So unless something comes up with huge warning lights telling me not to pursue animation I'm going to forget about modelling and rigging and push forward with animation. Thanks to my job research I know that a piece of software that's used by professionals as well as expected by employers is Autodesk's Maya.

After playing around with Maya and looking at various tutorials I created a quick 8 second animation to get a feel for the way it works. I downloaded a rigged practice model from:

http://www.animationmentor.com/

I downloaded The squirrel and stewart rigs, the squirrel being for beginners and the stewart model being a professional quality rig for use by animators of all levels. I only had a quick play with the squirrel rig but I decided to try making an animation with the stewart rig.

Using the stewart rig in Maya was strange to me, I felt a bit like my experience with a similar piece of software, 3DS Max, was both helpful but also a bit confusing as the tools in each program aren't the same or go by different names. While moving the character around I noticed there were some similarities with Source Film Maker, a free program I used to create one of my previous assignments. I started out with a rough animation and then went into each of the frames to try and make them seem a little more lifelike.

Here is my short eight second idle character animation I created using the stewart rig to get a feel for the animation controls:

"Stewart" starts by tapping his face with his finger as well as his foot on the ground, he then shifts his weight onto his other leg to tap his toes on the ground with the other foot while slightly hunching over and looking downwards. He also spreads his arms slightly to keep his balance on one foot.

When making this animation is was originally over in a couple of seconds as "Stewart" would perform all of these movements quickly one after the other. I used the graph editor and the scaling tool to change the timing of each individual body part. I got the idea to create this animation while pondering what I should have "Stewart" do when I figured there was no reason not to have him also ponder this question. I'll definately need to plan out any future animations by storyboarding as this will actually give me something to animate.

This was quite a learnable as well as enjoyable experience and I'm genuinely excited at the thought of pursuing a career in 3D animation as the process of animation is long but to me, it's extremely enjoyable even when making something as simple as this.