Blend Shapes
Once Emily finished rigging our bear we were able to animate. She made most of the bears facial expression using blend shapes but was missing one for "blinking' so I learnt how to make one. I started by duplicating the eyes and adjusted the mesh to a blinking pose. Then I created a blend shape from it which allowed me to easily animate our bear blinking.
Animating
I have a total of 9 scenes; 6 hand animated scenes and 3 animation where I will use mocap. Starting with the hand animated scenes, I referenced in the bear rig to my file where I set up the scene. Then I grouped all the elements in my scene and scaled it up until the bear was in the correct position and scale. I started blocking out the key poses for the animation and did some fine tuning in spline mode until I was satisfied with the result.
MOCAP animations
I also utilised some mocap data that we captured to use as animation for when the bear is performing a more complex movement like walking, running or playing basketball. The process was fair simple. I started by solving my mocap data and merging it with a default human model in Motion Builder. Then I baked this animation onto our bear rig in Maya. I trimmed the sequence to the desired length and then referenced this file into my scene file where I proceeded to edit the animation with animation layers. Although most of my mocap animations were fine, I discovered that the bear did not run for long enough before jumping into the pool. I attempted to animate the bear running in the first couple of frames but had trouble getting a smooth transition between the FK/IK leg rig. It resulted in a small glitch that most people would overlook the first time but I decided it would be best to take the time to refilm the mocap data.
Once I re-filmed the mocap data and applied it to my rig, the bear ran for long enough which meant I did not have to animate the legs. I achieved a much cleaner look and was definitely worth re-filming.
Filming
After much pain and agony with having to refilm about 6 times, we finally managed to film that last scene we needed to complete our rough cut. The scenes we re-filmed where the bedroom scenes because we previously had a lot of issues regarding the light and equipment. But this time round filming went much smoother and without a doubt we captured much nicer shots than what we began with. Although this project took a really long time to film, it definitely taught me some valuable lessons in what to always check for before filming and how to work efficiently.
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