Creating Procedural Animation for an Insect in Maya
In this Maya tutorial, we'll explore a method of creating MEL scripts that automatically generate motion of a walking ant. Software required: Maya 2015.
What you'll learn
In this Maya tutorial, we'll explore a method of creating MEL scripts that automatically generate motion of a walking ant. We'll look at driving our ant's stepping legs, head, antennae, and secondary body motion with scripts that respond to the changing position of the ant. In addition, we'll set up our rig so that the position of the ant can either be manually controlled by an animator, or guided by a procedural wandering path complete with automatic aim and pauses. By the end of this Maya training, you'll have learned techniques to better incorporate scripting and automation into your rigs. Software required: Maya 2015.
Table of contents
- Examining Procedural Animation 4m
- Creating IK Handles for the Legs 10m
- Defining the Stepping Motion of the Legs 9m
- Calculating the Distance Traveled per Frame 10m
- Connecting the Leg IK to Locators 7m
- Generating Step-down Motion in the Feet 10m
- Creating Reactive Body Motion 10m
- Visualizing Noise Functions 9m
- Scripting Motion for the Head 9m
- Scripting Motion for the Antennae 10m
- Scripting Motion for the Abdomen 9m
- Creating a Switch for Manual and Auto Wandering 8m
- Visualizing the Smoothing of the Path 7m
- Generating the Noise for the Wandering Path 7m
- Defining the Motion Vectors for the Path 8m
- Adding an Exponent to the Path Smoothing 8m
- Connecting the Smoothed Noise to the Transform 9m
- Creating Random Pauses for the Wandering Path 7m
- Setting up the Animation for Final Render 8m
About the author
Beau Janzen is a CG Supervisor with over 24 years’ experience in digital animation production. In that time, he has served on a wide variety of projects ranging from feature films, television series, commercials, and stereoscopic ride films. His work has spanned the full spectrum of CG production including on-set supervision, concept design, production pipeline design, and project coordination. In addition to his production work, he has over ten years of classroom teaching experience.