Plan:
To create a short animation sequence using "Maya" to create the CG element and Composer  to composite the CG element over a still picture.
 

StoryBoard:
I was amazed at the way "Brian Sorge" composited an apple image over a parking-lot image. The final composition looked as if it was taken as a single shot. I wanted to use that image somewhere in my course...........happy that now I have got a chance  to use that image. I kept this as my background image for my Maya animation, and I decided to put  a CG element in it. The concept is to get a  composited,  animated  final image which makes the viewer think as if  he is into graphics world.  I decided to create a dancing doll that  dances when it is hit by an object. Here the object that causes the doll to dance is a ball. I am sure that this combination of a giant apple, a giant dancing doll, a giant ball along with a real-size car would  thrill the viewer.
 
 

Raw Images:

Description:

Maya part:
The doll element was created using nurb spheres(face and eyes) and polygon cylinders(base, nose and the connecting limb). Ball is a nurb sphere. Spheres and cylinders were carefully scaled and aligned to get a doll. The eyes and mouth were parented to the face(sphere). And the whole head was parented to the connecting limb. A Deform tool, bend was used to deform the doll during  its swing from left to right and vice versa. This tool helped to lot in making the doll deform realistically when dancing.

The ball was made to rotate throughout  its motion.  This was done to make the movement of the ball real with some rotation in it. I didn't want to use the squash tool to squash the ball during its motion, because I thought that it would look clumsy.

I used two lights, one to act as a sunlight and the other to lit up the CG elements throughout the animation sequence, so that the CG elements are visible to the viewer throughout the sequence.

Setting up the lights and getting shadows were the time consuming acts I encountered. It took me hours to set up the lights in right places in correspondence with the sunlight. Getting shadows at the right places was another tedious task. I made only one light to show up the shadows. The other was used to have a better look at the objects.

Default camera was used, since the background is still.

Thegraph editors for the animation of the doll and the ball:
 

Composer part:

It just took me few minutes to composite the CG elements onto the background image.The compositing was done using the overtool. This is how my compositing flow graph look like ......

Animation sequence:

The final animation sequence(120 frames) runs at 24 frames per second.  The image format is 320 x 240.

Click here to enter into the graphics world.

raja jothi's home page
graphics page