Introduction

The story of my animation is that a chubby clown, riding a unicycle, performs his best going through a big fire ring, but he breaks into the floor at the end. The idea came from one of Maya tutorials in which a bouncing ball is jumping though a fire ring, but I wanted to add more complexity, such as human walking, and humor to my animation. Reproducing natural human working in animation seemed to be time consuming, and I wanted to stick with a concept of two main objects, so a clown riding a unicycle was the best combination I got.

The title of this animation "BamBoo CIRCUS" has no meaning, just a sound, I think, fits to the animation.
 
 

Environment

Hardware:

Alias/Wavefront MAYA

Software (editing):

• MediaConvert (for creating a movie clip from a series of iff files)
• MovieMaker (for editing movie clips and sounds and creating a final product)
• SoundEditor (for editing sound)
• ImgWorks (for converting iff file into TIFF or GIF)

I decided to create two main objects in this project. The first one is a unicycle, and the second a clown. Of course many other objects are in the animation, but my focus is trying to create these objects beyond the primitive level.
 

	Unicycle This is the first object I created in this project. It took me one day to complete it. Since I didnít know how to use modeling tools, I did so many unnecessary things, but I got confidence to create something that looks real after this. It uses a lot of cylinders as a real unicycle is made of. The rim is made of a surface that is created by revolving a CURBS line.
	Clown The clown consists of many parts, head, body, legs, arms, etc. I shaped most of them in component mode by pressing and stretching NURBS primitives, such as cylinder and sphere. For example, to create the head I used Sculpt Surface Tool to shape the face out of a sphere. And globes and shoes are also out of a sphere.  Inside of the clown are skeleton joints so that the clown is able to move its arms, legs and body. Creating joints is easy, but moving appropriately is hard; putting IK handles on proper places is important.

 

I created three textures for the clown:
 

Eye	Shirt	Tie/ Pants

I used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create these textures files. All of them are very simple geometric, but they are important to make the character a clown. These files are saved in sgi format and stored in the animation project folder. Whenever I bound a texture on an object, always something unexpected happened, such as the texture was upside down, rotated, or pressed vertically. So working on attribute setting was almost always necessary to make it look appropriate.
 
 
 

	Set This is a place where the clown performs. Since I spent much time creating the unicycle and clown, other objects shown in this picture were very simple. Each of them is just one of NURBS or Polygon primitives, or a pressed figure of them.
	Sign poster This is the starting scene of the movie. Since I wanted to create an atmosphere for the short movie, this sign poster on the back of the set, like outside wall of a circus tent, let viewers recognize the space of the virtual story. For creating picture I set the clown and unicycle and rendered the scene. Then I imported the image into Adobe Illustrator and added the title and the borders. The created sign is used as a texture and bound on a NURBS plane that has little curls on corners.

 

Animation

The hardest part of this project was synchronizing the clownís legs and the pedals. I spent three days to figure out the proper movement of riding a unicycle. Originally I tried to use one of constraints to attach a shoe on a pedal, but there was no perfect method to properly attach them together. After struggling for a couple of days, I finally found the way to do it ó parenting the IK handle for a leg to a pedal. I deleted joints I had created for the feet so that the each end of leg joints is on the pedal.

The next hardest part was creating proper relationship of objects to move the character as one figure. Wrong use of grouping and parenting creates a disaster when a movement is added.

I didnít use the path feature to move the clown. The sequence of movements was done in step-by-step manner: first move the character from a point to another; second rotate the character to the moving direction; third rotate pedals as the character moves forward or backward; and finally tilt the character appropriately.

Fire looks very good in Maya, but it is also easy to create it. This is one of reliable features in Maya, so I can leave it at the last moment. This is the only special effect I use in the project, and it looks great!

I had watched "a bugís life" before I started the project. I was inspired with the eye movement of characters in the movie, so I tried to mimic it. The result is not exactly as good as that in the movie, but it is successful to create face expressions of the clown. A difficult part of this is matching the centre of pivots of eyeball and eyelids. Moving eyelids is just tedious. I understood how good the those characters are in "a bugís life."

The mouse movement was not originally in my plan, but it was necessary to make the character smile. Since the movement was done by pulling a part of each lip object, I needed to switch to the component mode to do this.

Cameras/ Lights

Two cameras are used in the project: one for the first half up to the point the clown just went through the fire ring; and another for the rest of the movie. The first camera moves itself to capture the whole environment. The second camera is set to mainly shoot the character, and it stays the same position, just changes the angle.

One ambient light and four spotlights are used in the project. Intensities of the lights are different; I set 0.8 for the ambient light and between 0.5 to 0.9 for the spotlights. I created relatively dark space, but one spotlight chases the clown to set off the character.
 
 

Sounds

Since sound enhances realism, I added music and three sound effects. I tried to collect good sounds that fit into scenes from Internet, but it was hard to find ones I wanted. Still my animation gets much better with sounds.
 
 

Conclusion

I really enjoyed the project. I spent about three weeks for the entire project. Starting from scratch, I think I did a good job, but I wish I had more time to complete the project because once you start you want to increase the quality of models and animation. Maya is obviously very powerful, but also very complicated for beginners like us. This project was really good to use and feel the professional tools, and I understood what we did in the course was just the basics of computer graphics programming.
 
  Back to 3P98 2001 Animation Gallery.