Introduction

In today’s lesson I practised animation using a model of a helicopter, using motion paths and rigs.

A rig is like the ‘skeleton’ of an object that will be animated – like the wire armature inside of a puppet. It allows the model to be articulated. A character rig consists of a skeleton and controllers, which are linked through a series of constraints that allow Maya to decide which parts of the model are animated when the controllers are moved.

Animating a Rig.

This is the helicopter rig I animated in Maya:

Here is a reference video I used to help animate this rig:

I started by animating the gradual spinning of the main rotors, starting to spin slowly, and speeding up to get the helicopter off the ground. To do this, I created one keyframe at the start of the timeline and one in the middle and used the graph editor to create the gradual speed-up of the rotors. From there, I created a second keyframe at the end of the timeline and used the graph editor to make the acceleration of the rotors constant once they had reached a certain speed. The straight diagonal line shows this constant acceleration.

I then animated the position of the landing gear with keyframes to give the effect of the helicopter’s suspension releasing as it lifted off the ground.

Here is the animation I produced within the time. I ran out of time before animating the rear rotor.

The next task was to animate a helicopter landing on top of a building using some more files provided by the tutor. I arranged the buildings to look like a city, and once again animated the helicopter using the rig from before and keyframing. This is what I was able to produce:

Conclusion

Overall, this was good practise for me in using Maya for animating. I also used a rig for the first time, which is adding more skills to my 3D animation skillset.