Animation test 2

this is the animation test 2, which has the bubbel shader Ash imported in

Animation sequence 1

real and cartoon bubble simulation

compositing and maya fish refrence

Here are some videos used for refrence when compositing our maya scene into live action

Animation test

Filming complete

Ok Wednesday was the day me and Ash had schedule was the day we would start filming our live action footage, we could not start animating our fishes unless we had the filming done so filming was our main objective. I had already planned from before that i would bring in my HD camcorder to use to film our footage but at the last min i found out that once the footage was recoreded i would need Sony Vegas programe to convert the footage to quicktime format which the uni does not have. On the day of filming we thought we might aswell ask the laon shop for any cameras that are available to rent, they said the latest we would be able to recieve a camera would be next week Tuesday. That would definetly be a no no as Rave on air is set for May 29th and filming few days before the deadline would be impossible. We tried asking everyone we knew if they had a camera or could bring one in the next day, Sam and Stuart said that they may have one lying around at home somewhere but wasnt a garantee. After finding Jared and letting him no about our situation he hooked us up with a camera from the loan shop which was very good of him. And after that the whole day was spent on filming and uploading the footage up on the hard drive.

Rigging complete

OK i managed to get the rig done smoothly in the end, i roughly spent two days on the rig as its not part of what i am familiar with. Searching on the internet for examples for some fish rigs was unsuccessful as most of the tutorials covered human rigging. The problem i encountered earlier was the distortion with the side fins when rotating the main back fins. I found out this was caused when i started the first joint from where the mouth was, for some reason this was the reason for the distortion of the other parts of the fish’s body. Through trial and error i came across a solution which was to start the joint from half way of the fish’s belly, this seemed to clear the distortions that would be caused by rotating the back fins. And secondly i really didn’t have to paint any weights which was good to hear. I was going to use squash and stretch deformers to imitate the breath in and out motion, instead i thought it would be more convenient if i would produce this motion using blend shapes. Before i started on the rigging procedure i went and did abit of research on previous fish rigs hoping it would give me a clear understanding of where to start. I found a particularly good fish rig done by an individual on YouTube, i went ahead and messaged the person for some advice. This is what he had to say

"With the fish, rig it normally, use splineIK for the tail, blend shapes for the mouth and rig the fins simply but use blend shapes for any curving fin poses. On another rig, use dynamic spline IK for the tail, referencing your splines from the other rig. That way you get some nice ripples when you need to".

I showed this to Ash also but in the end i didnt really use it as i really didnt understand the procedure in making the similar motion. In the end here is a picture of the final rig structure i used for my fish