Project 4 Help Session : Character Modeling

There are many parts of Learning Alias which may apply to this project. Here is a prioritized guide, revised from the original assignment:

Animation Basics
Lesson 15: Keyframe and Motion Path Animation
Lesson 16: Hierarchical Animation and/or
Character Animation, Lesson 19: Inverse Kinematics, and
Lesson 20: Constraints (pp359-365)
Lesson 22: Character Builder
Lesson 21: Animating with Deformation Control (as needed)
Lesson 17: Animating with Metamorphosis (as needed)
Lesson 18: Expressions (as needed)
Lesson 20: Constraints (as needed)

Definitely read Animation Basics and go through Lesson 15 to learn how to make and view an animation. Skip the part about shader animation, though. You don't need that yet. Lesson 16 has most of what you need for the first modeling part of the assignment if you choose to use a hierarchical model. Again, skip the shader animation.

The alternative to using a hierarchical model is to use skeletons, which are introduced in Character Animation and covered in Lesson 19. The beginning of Lesson 20 covers the process of attaching a model to a skeleton. They give you all the pieces, though. Obviously, making the model and skeleton compatible requires careful design and planning.

For the simple model with smoothly articulated joints, refer to Lesson 22. This lesson goes into more depth than you need for this exercise, so just take what you need. Lessons 21 and 17 cover animation of totally deformable models. There might be some useful information here, but nothing critical.

Lessons 18 and 20 cover more powerful tools for animating. You probably won't need these yet.

Flipbook

You will need to save your flipbook animations as single files for project handin. To do so:

render animation to create SDL file (e.g. sdl/neato.sdl)
Animation->Flipbook...
open first frame of animation (e.g. pix/neato.01)
open Flipbook control panel using diagonal arrow button in Flipbook menu bar
Book List->Book Management->Write Active

This sequence will create a single file containing your animation. You can view this file with the Flipbook tool. In the above example, the final file would be pix/neato.bk.

You can use the Flipbook without running Power Animator. Just type:
flipbook filename.