Specification For FYP

Project Type: ANIMATION
Short Character animation – “The Busker” working Title

The goal I have for my final year is to create a short character animation piece in 3D that is roughly one and a half minutes long. It is a musical piece that follows the exploits of a busker; the piece will be musical in nature but feature no dialogue as I want to focus mainly on the characters movements, and the timings that come with the music being so key.

My personal objectives for the short are to use it as a way to really hone my character animating skills and to be able to have a product at the end that shows off my talents as an animator. I believe that going through the whole process from creation to fruition will help with this and allow me to better myself at things such as key poses and using body language to show the emotions of the character. It also allows me practice with working with a composer as this may be a part of my job in the future years. I also plan to research different methods for animating crowds, I will be looking at 3D and 2D methods to see which would be the best for my project.

In terms of production I will be minimising the workload as best I can by keeping modelling down to a minimum so as to give more time to fine tune the animation. I plan on using free rigs such as the Morpheus rig, as I can create different looking characters that are still in the same style as each other and fully rigged without any time consuming work. This also leads into the environment as most of this animation will take place from a static shot I will only have to model and texture a small section of street and a few instruments. Using the Morpheus rig also leads into the design of the street as I will want the environment to match the characters.
I plan on retexturing the rigs so as to put them in shirt and trousers, then using hair in Maya I will make a dynamic tie so as to show more secondary motion and get more life into the animation.
In order to make the crowd I believe I will animate them separately and then composite them over the top of the animation as I believe this will be the most productive way of doing this and making, or I may look at other possible solutions.
I will be doing all production in Autodesk Maya including modelling and animating, however any sculpting that needs doing will be done in either Mudbox or zbrush. The final composite will be done with Nuke.


The product at the end of this project will be a one and a half minute 3D animated short that I will have partially designed, and animated and composited myself. I will be then able to use this piece to exhibit at expoTees hopefully, and have a good portfolio piece. The audience for this piece is young adults and general music lovers as I am aware that it will not appeal to younger audience (children) due to the lack of comedy in the piece. However, I do believe that due to the original music and style of animation that it will be well received.

Report writing will be an ongoing process, and will be roughly 8000 words long.

December
Week 1 - Write script, finish spec
Week 2 - Character designs, Environment Designs
Week 3 - Storyboard, Music Composition
Week 4 - Animatic, Music Composition, Report Writing

January
Week 5 - Modelling of assets, Modifying Rigs
Week 6 - Scene set up, texturing and lighting
Week 7 - Begin blocking
Week 8 - Continue blocking, Report Writing

February
Week 9 - Blocking animation
Week 10 - Blocking animation
week 11 - Blocking animation
Week 12 - Blocking animation, Report writing

March
Week 13 - Inbetweening Animation
Week 14 - Inbetweening Animation
Week 15 - Inbetweening Animation
Week 16 - Inbetweening Animation, Report Writing

April
Week 17 - Polish Animation
Week 18 - Rendering
Week 19 - Rendering
Week 20 - Compositing, Report Writing

May
Week 21 - Editing, CompleteReport Writing
Week 22 - safety