Tigerade

This was my second Maya project. For this project, the main focus for this assignment is character rigging and animation. As the semester progressed, my class learned about how to create a rig for a character and then using the rig we designed for our characters, animate it. There are no other specific criteria for this project.

The modeling process wasn't that hard. Then again, I didn't model a very complicated character. I wanted to keep it simple since the focus was rigging and animation for this course anyways. I figured if I focus too much on the modeling, I may miss something and fall behind with what I was suppose to learn during the semester.

I was glad I thought that way because creating a rig for the character was quite overwhelming. There are a lot of details to pay attention to especially when it comes to constraints of a particular joints. There is a lot of information just for rigging that it's can completely be it's own class. The stuff learned during the semester about rigging was kinda rushed due to the fact that we had to learn everything during a semester so some information I gathered were a little confusing to the point where I just got lost. Overall, I got the basics of rigging but what really gets me is the different constraints applied to specific joints. I was able to create a reasonable rig for my simple character but not without a lot of confusion and hours trying to figure things out.

Originally, I wanted to animate my character to do some crazy, complicated dunk to make animation the forefront of the entire animation short. However, I spent too much time figuring and creating the rig for my character that I fell behind my original schedule so I had to make some adjustments to my original story. Instead of doing a complicated dunk, I changed it to where there are just simple animations, but a lot of it during the course of the animation. I don't have a background in the animation due to the fact I wanted to make it seem like one of those commercials where you see the entire basketball court but hardly anything beyond that. I guess I could've done more to it then what I have in it but I was falling behind and I just didn't have the time for it.

As for the story or the concept of this animation, it's basically a commercial spoof or parody of the Gatorade and Red Bull commercials I've seen on TV. It's more towards the Red Bull commercials with their trademark quote "Red Bull, it gives you wings." I needed a fictional product name and since I play a lot of basketball and drink Gatorade, I used that as a base and created Tigerade. With a product name, all I needed was a catch phrase so I used Red Bull's quote as a base and came up with "Tigerade, it gives you MAD hops." From there, I just needed to create something to center around that quote. Instead of making it boring where I could have a character who couldn't jump but after drinking the product, it can finally jump higher, I changed it up a little bit. I went with more of a comedic approach which I applied in the animation.

This was probably the most difficult project I've done mainly due to the huge amount of information given in such a short time about rigging and animating. It was a lot to take it and I wasn't able to fully absorb all that information. I wasn't exactly happy how my animation turned out but that's due to the fact I struggled during the semester to process information given so I have no one else to blame but myself. The way I see this animation is a piece that measures my progress of where I was at in the area of rigging and animation at that time and would go back and see this piece to see how far I've gone in future animation projects.