Our concept:
We recently rewatched the movie Tarzan which if you aren’t familiar with it is an animated movie about a man who grew up amongst animals in the jungle learning about society and the rest of society learning about him and his ways. We wanted to sort of recreate a scene from that movie and were specifically inspired by creating an experience where the user would interact with the animals in the scene. Within the movie Tarzan there are really intricate and interesting friendships and mutual respect between animals and humans that I think some people could learn from today.
In our animation Tarzan is the one swinging down and flipping and Jane is the one petting the animals. We wanted Jane to be the one interacting with the animals to show her progression of learning about the world Tarzan came from in the movie.
Process:
Building/programming the layout: We went into Aero and selected the jungle background, lake, and three animals from Aero. I did not animate the backgrounds, but we created triggers for the animals to move, bounce, spin, and orbit either when you tap them or when the program starts.
The mannequins:
We used primarily animations from Mixamo because the motion captured animations we captured last assignment were not super relevant to the environment we wanted to create and the mixamo animations were a lot smoother than what we could capture with softwares like Rokoko. We wanted the mannequins to move in connected movements. In order to do so, we downloaded our desired movements from Mixamo after using mixamo to map them to the mannequin file from the content folder. We imported the fbx files into blender, changed the animation timeline to be nonlinear, converted the animations into actions, and then deleted them all except one. Because we had saved the animations as actions in blender we could then connect them as a series of actions and have them be one smooth animation.
Reflections:
Kenzie – I spent a lot of time on this project trying to figure out the animation portion. I definitely learned a lot about Mixamo and especially about the animation process in blender. Before I had just known of Blender as a 3D modeling software and I learned a lot about its animation capabilities while doing this project. I also learned a lot about Aero and its animation features while moving the files from blender into Aero. It was interesting combining elements that were native to Aero with elements that we imported and creating the environment that way. Overall once we got it all working together and interacting with the other objects it was really cool!
Alexandra – I definitely learned many concepts in Aero and Maximo using this project. I struggled quite a bit with this project as I couldn’t figure out how to make the mannequins do their animations once put into Aero. I watched many videos but none of them directly explained how, so through trial and error and playing with the program, I finally figured it out and got it to run pretty smoothly.