Hello, and welcome to my blog on my process of creating the animations for a 3D character. The character that I will be using will be animated using Maya, and since I was not enrolled into the Character Design module last term, I will not be using my own original character for this animation process.
Getting Animation Ideas
For this assignment, I decided on figuring out what kind of animations I want to make before dedicating myself to a character model, meaning that I will choose a character based on the animations I have in mind to create.
The first animation I thought of making was a sort of martial arts training animation, I was compelled to try and go for this because I had recently watched the Karate Kid movies and was inspired by them and I could use some of the scenes from the movies as references.
Another animation I thought of doing was one where the character tries kicking down a door and fails, leading them to barge the door down with their shoulder after a run up.
I couldn’t really think of a unique animation for the third, so for the meantime I decided that I could use a sprinting animation if I hadn’t thought of one by the time I finished my first two.
Getting a Character
Given the ideas that I had for my animations, I thought about using a high athletics character like a warrior monk or ninja since the first animation is a martial art animation.
So I explored SketchFab, looking for a monk character first but was unable to find any that I really liked. Though I did find some interesting models while searching for a monk such as a skeleton warrior and a medieval knight which I thought of using. However as I later found out that the skeleton and the monk model I did find weren’t downloadable on SketchFab, and I was unsure of using the knight model since it costed money and I didn’t have any animations planned out for a knight character.
From there, I found two ninja cyborg models which I decided to choose from. The one of the two I chose Cyborg Ninja Warrior which was made by Voxyde on SketchFab.
So, I had a character and some animation ideas, next step is to work on importing and rigging the character in maya.