A guy at work asked me if I did flash animation, and I told him no. He wanted an animated stick figure to pick up a toolbox in a PowerPoint presentation.
I asked him if he would perhaps consider another approach and showed him Blender.
The upshot was, that I made the little animation shown below. Took me quite a while because I finally had to break down and attempt to animate something with a rig (however primitive). I tried a mesh deform rig at first but it was a disaster and there were time considerations, so I went with a robot with separate objects parented to each bone. My "client" seemed to be quite pleased with the result.
(I didn't want to mess with a walk cycle, again, time constraints for how soon he needed the animation, so he's a "hover bot") The cross hair in the corner is for registering the image in PowerPoint, we "stacked" three gif animations on top of one another and then used Powerpoint to animate the transition between them. It starts with a gif of the robot just hovering. When the mouse is clicked, it transitions to the one below, which, after a time, transitions to one of the robot hovering, but holding the toolbox out to his left.
Then I went on to tinker further with the thing, gave him a set of (really bad) hands, added a push broom, and, after a bit of struggle, figured out how to animate him "cleaning up". Right now I am in the process of trashing the hands and giving him new ones (for some reason I made fingers with only two joints, rather than 3), and re-rigging the hands. I also want to change the way the broom is animated, he should be lifting it up at the end of the push stroke and bringing it back instead of just sort of "shufffling" it back and forth. Also would like to change the bristles and animate them moving as the broom is pushed, plus maybe add some little "dust particles" as he sweeps. If I get real ambitious, I might even attempt to add some small bits of stuff for him to actually sweep up, maybe even add a little "robot dustpan" to come and collect it.
Youtube vid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U8cL0K5A1ASingle frame of the animation.
Topic: robot (Read 442 times)
