Prop Animation

Alongside our character animation, there is more to our scene that just an environment and moving characters.  The assets that these characters engage and draw attention to, also play an important part in the overall dynamic and quality of the story.  Assets such as the coffee pot, paper, crayons, clock, cloth and menu are some of the elements of our project that also need to be animated and worked with in partnership with our characters.

Within this blog, I will discuss the process of animating these elements and provide playblast videos of what these models look like in action.

Firstly, our menu.  The menu has been talked about a lot ever since we have our story line finalised way back in October.  We never really tied down how this object would appear, how it would animate and what features it would have.  Originally, the AI waitress would pull the menu out from behind her back when welcoming us, set it on the table and it would come to life.  After this proved difficult, I decided it would be best to have the menu already on the table, and then the AI would mention it and wave her hand to activate it in front of us.

The issue we had with this is that many of our user testers wanted to touch this menu and interact with it.  Especially because our AI welcomes the user to explore the menu.  We needed to introduce a warning into the scene that informed the user that interaction had not yet been developed.  This lowered the desire to touch the menu.  Below is a look at the menu animation that has been created for the scene.  It appears, spins and disappears after the little girl starts to get aggravated.

Another key asset from our animation is that of the mug that the young man uses throughout the scene.  He takes a drink and moves the mug within my section of animation.  I struggled to get the mug to stay in his hand but with intricate key framing, we got there eventually.  Below is a screen grab video of the animated mug -

After animating my section, I realised that our AI waitress was missing something.  While she is cleaning the tables, she is just moving her hand across the table...we forgot to model a cloth.  I threw together a quick, low poly cloth model to be brought into the scene and paired with the waitress's hand to make it as if she is cleaning the tables.  Below is the cloth animated -

Below is a GIF image I got from Cassie's blog and it features some of the page animation I completed that would feature within the girl's section of narrative.

The last asset I want to discuss in this post, is the coffee pot.  The coffee pot plays a big part in the first glitch of our narrative.  It is important that this animation was smooth and linked up well with the actions of the AI waitress.  Below is the animated coffee pot after it was exported from the AI animation -