The Frog Does Leap! (1/7)

 Good Afternoon! I'm not very good at posting progress on my work, but I can at the very least begin compiling my progress on my final piece of work leading up to the deadline!

So, since starting my second year in university, we've begun learning how to animate quadrupeds (aka Creature Animation) and have been tasked with creating a short animated sequence (about 7 to 12 seconds long) that features a quadruped performing a cyclical action and a non cyclical action. This also required us to create storyboards so we can understand fully what we need and what exactly we are animating.

I... decided to make this hard for myself, I won't deny it.

I wanted to take the point of a quadruped and bend the rule as much as I could - not because I didn't want to animate a house cat or a crocodile, but because I thought the challenge of animating a quadruped found doing more unusual cycles would be quite fun! It was fun in the end, but my choices were narrowed down to an axolotl (of which is purely aquatic, meaning I'd have to replicate a motion in water - which is something I'd like to do) and a frog (which is known for jumping from place to place, not so much walking).

Due to not being able to find an affordable axolotl model (that was even rigged in the first place), I settled with the frog idea and boarded it out - also determined to find a working rig for not only a frog but a fly.

Here's my storyboard! Quick Summary: A Frog hops onto some rocks and then eats a fly.

So, with my storyboard being approved by my tutor, I began blocking out my final animation.

There was one big hiccup that caused a huge problem: my original animatic file was (to my surprise) approximately 1.22 GB in size! In other words, way too big for Maya to be able to read without it imploding on itself.

So, guess who start the blockout all over again? Me. I did.

So, with that extremely frustrating realisation, I began chipping away at the set I was using. Pretty much everything I was using came from my uni's shared drive on the local storage (so if anyone knows who the original owner of my river set was, let me know!).

This file size cutting madness began with the set I was using: a river set that was too small for my needs but also extremely dense. Why? There were very detailed bushes and flowers and shrubs all along the bank of this river that (like pretty much the whole set) had lost the their textures and did nothing but chug Maya when it was autosaving.

So, I got to work: I replaced the bushes with some really low poly cubes that I tried to make look like hedge rows and also manually scaled up some of the rocks along the river bed so that my frog had something to hop onto. I also may or may not have replaced the water.

And then, with a quick test with the HDRI I wanted to use for rendering.....

That's what it looks like! I may have broken the illusion a little bit, but I wanted to just show off the changes I made so that my file would actually load.

So, that's all my prep work out of the way, I suppose I better share my blockouts too...

Here's the original blockout: (For those that want to know why these videos look like they were rendered from a potato, this won't be what the final render will look like)

As you can see, the plants are very detailed. Now, here's the blockout I ended up with after trying to recreate it (with a few changes for the sake of flair):

So, with the these blockouts done, I began working on the frog's full animation.

A few roadblocks caught me out: I hadn't looked for reference footage of how a frog turns itself around, so I went to hunt some down ( I eventually cam across some footage). I also found that I had a lot of problems with foot slipping again, meaning I'd need to transfer the animation to World Space (A method that I can go over once I redo it later down the line) - turns out that my frog doesn't like WorldBake (a plugin for Maya created by Morgan Loomis - Link to the plugin page here!).

I can get screenshots of this problem and post them later, mostly because I'm scared of what it might do to my Maya files if I try it again.

Well, to finish off for now, I've finally finished the main animation work needed for the frog! I am very proud of myself, and had a very powerful drive to just work on it yesterday (I won't lie, I wanted to just work on it all day it was a very strange and welcome feeling). So, other than smaller details such as the fingers on the front two legs (referred to as arms by the rig, which is fair), I have finished the frog and am ready to attempt a six-legged insect cycle!

To close off, here's the blockout with a fully animated frog!

Also, TL;DR: I am animating a frog eating a fly, and just finished the animation for the frog today. I am very proud.

Sorry for the long post!