Starting to Animate

To start animating my model I opened a new Maya file and imported both the chair and my teddy bear model. This way I wouldn’t be directly affecting my original models and if anything was to mess up, or I needed to edit them for some reason I’d be able to do that and then just import them again.

This ended up coming in handy as I found that as I was animating my bear and went to set the model back to its original pose, it deformed. I realised that this had happened because I had forgotten to freeze the transformations on some of my control curves.

As I had the copy of my model before I started animating it, I was able to open up that file and freeze the transformations, then import it back into the file I was animating in. This did mean that I lost the animation I had already started, but it wasn’t much so I didn’t mind so much.

Now having a model that I knew wouldn’t create any more issues when I tried to animate, I started to animate again. I decided that it would be best for me to start by setting out the main three points of action in the animation, the starting pose, the pose where the teddy bear is mid-climbing the chair, and the end pose, and that’s what I did.

Having these action poses would make sure that I would be focused when animating and wouldn’t lose sight of where the animation was going.