Introduction

In this lesson, I animated a character rig of the Luxo Jr character from Pixar studios’ famous title animation. In the past few lessons, I learned about animating along a curved path, animating a helicopter rig and using set driven keys to animate.

Luxo Jr.

The next task was to research Luxo Jr, the short film made by Pixar.

Luxo Jr was released in 1986 after four months of work, directed and animated by John Lasseter. The film was created for the SIGGRAPH computer graphics convention and is recognised as a groundbreaking achievement for the animation studio. This is partly because Pixar was showcasing their new lighting technology, which allowed the lamps in the film to cast shadows on themselves and project lights in the scene. The film was also groundbreaking, as it showed that a household object could be animated in 3D like a character to display a range of emotions. It was a simple, yet effective showcase of what Pixar was capable of. The film took 135 days to render in total.

Animating the Luxo Lamp Rig

Next, I started animating a Luxo lamp rig. Before using the rig however, I needed to set up the rig so that I could only select and move the controllers and not any parts of the actual rig, which would mess up the rig. To do this, I went to the ‘Show’ menu at the top of the Maya viewport. I then unticked the ‘IK Handles’ option and the same for the ‘Joints’ option.

I was then able to select different controllers and move them to articulate the lamp.

The diamond shaped rig at the base of the lamp could be selected to move or rotate the entire model. Here are some images to show this:

Next, the first ring shaped controller above the diamond shape could be used to move or rotate the base of the lamp only:

Next, the ring below the lamp’s head could be used to move the arm of the lamp:

And the cross at the joint of the lamp’s arm could be used to rotate the arm:

And the cross next to the lamp’s head was used to rotate the head up, down, and side to side

Animating the Rig

For the next task, I manipulated these controllers with rotate and move keyframes to create a short animation of the lamp being intrigued by the cube.