Toolkit 2 - Maya Lesson 5: Loosening Up and Motion Blur

  Now that we have the Graph Editor all cleaned up, it's time to work on loosening up the spine and bringing in a better impression of weight. 

  Firstly we add two more frames, 226 and 223. We want to end Moom's animation with a small bounce to show him catching himself as the barbell weight comes to rest. As with all the previous key frames, once happy we head back into the graph editor and tidy up the tail end of our curves. This is to place a more successful easing in and out. 

  To loosen up the spine, we used the Graph Editor again. Working from the root control, we work our way up the spine and move all the key frames in the graph editor along to bring in a staggering effect. Once done, we use refer back to our original key frames and re-key, deleting all the in between frames.

  With this complete, we go back into cleaning up the graph editor and start to remove the twinning found in the feet. We re-arrange the key frames so to give a small start and delay to one of the feet as the lift upwards.

  To attach the barbel, we selected one of the hand controls and used a parent constraint (first selecting the hand then the barbell). Now as the hand moves in the animation, the barbell moves along with it. There was some slight of rotation when the hand was moving, so removing to kept it and 90 degrees. We left the other hand free and re-keyed its animation to help keep up with the bar. 

  With all the elements in place, we can move onto polishing up the scene and rendering out the sequence. We create in a sky dome light and a directional light, changing the exposure and the sampling to get the best effect . Hiding all the Nurbs curves and controls, we change the Arnold render settings and export out images as Tiff's.

  For the pixel blur, we move into After Effect and import the images as one sequence. Placing the Pixel Blur overlay, we want to be careful how much blur we add. The higher the shutter angle, the higher the blur and too much can cause the animation to become soft.