Animating & Camera set ups

Animating the project was a lot of fun, I the first thing I done was much like in the 3D animatic was to animate the cars moving from start to finish which was in effect sort of like blocking but much easier. It helped speed up this process as I already worked some of the timing issues that needed to be addressed with the animatic. Once this was done I started adding animation to the suspensions to give the cars their sense of weight. This was an area I wanted to reflect real cars so I tried to make them behave the same way a real life car would with a bit more emphasis. The scene with the suspension is mainly where you notice the most of movement until its rusty hydraulics malfunction.

One of my concerns earlier in the year were whether the facial blendshapes would be possible to animate without having controls made. Using Maya's shape editor worked and I named the blenshapes and created groups to make life a bit easier. The only quarrel was that Maya would not dispplay the keyframes set in the shape editor on the timeline so I would have to go into the characters attribute editor and look for the blendshapes associated with its mesh in order to view the keyframes I had set.

The way in which the mouth blendshapes were animated was by keying the mouth open then closed before moving on to a new mouth shape, in some cases having a mouth not keyed and open would interfere with the animated shapes preventing them from animating fully.

To insure the cars were centred in each lane I divided the track with edge ring split

Camera set up:

I used Maya's camera sequencer to edit my shots together. This was very handy as I have a lot of camera shots in each scene. I broke up the rest by making camera cuts with key frames within some of the cameras themselves

My pov camera was set up by parenting it to the characters head and key framing the mesh visibility

cameras were also parented to cars for the car following shots

for animating the wheels, a temporrary camera had to be mounted to the cars as it was difficult to do this from the perspective camera with the cars moving fast