Animation - Disco Beaver

After finishing uni and realising that despite my love of 3D modelling, I had little to show for it, I decided to get to work on a brand new animation. This way I could I would be able to add something to my port folio, as well as use this as an opportunity to improve my animation skills.

I really enjoyed the last project that I did, which was the short animation aimed at children, so I decided to do another one in the same style. One of the first things that I decided on was making the characters dance, as dancing involves a lot of movement, and therefore meant that it would test my animating skills. I eventually decided on having a beaver as the main character, as it rhymed with fever, as in disco fever. I also included a wolf character for the story.


Disco Beaver, and the Wolf!


The animation is almost 5 minutes long. It starts off with the beaver building a dance floor. Once he completes it, he starts to dance, only to be interrupted by a wolf. The beaver thinks that the wolf is about to eat him, but infact the wolf wants to join in with the dancing, so the two dance together.

Its a light-hearted story to suit the simple model style of the characters. I believe that it would be suitable for children, much like my last project, 'Pigham'.

Disco fever!

I am satisfied with the final animation. Whilst I believe that there is certainly room for improvement, it is still a good quality animation. The main aspects that I would like to improve on is the walking animation of both characters and the lighting. As I used my own bone rig for the biped of the models, I was unable to use the built-in walking animation that Max provides. I have to work on the animation in order to make it more fluent. I would also vastle improve the overall lighting. Lighting has never been my strong point, but I would love to one day be able to create realistic lighting in order to make my animations much more effective.

Very cool


The animation can be viewed here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lD_-unfJOg

NOTE - Without thinking, I decided to use copyrighted music for the dances rather than royalty free music. As Youtube is extremely strict with copyrights, it may be possible that the music in the video is eventually replaced, or the video itself may even unfortunately be completely taken down.

I completed this animation in june 2011.