Test Animation - Dr. Frankenstein's Lab
The test animation I posted about last week has a long and interesting history. Some classes in the Honors College require a final creative project rather than a test. A friend of mine, Josh, was in such a class in the Fall semester of 2006. For his creative project, he did a computer animation of Dr. Frankenstein's lab. (He chose the lab because his class had read Frankenstein and the creative project had to tie in with the class somehow.) During the winter break that followed, he and I discussed doing a computer animation for our Honors College Senior Thesis. We decided that an animation sounded fun, so we set to work getting professional software. He had used free software for his creative project which, while pretty good, isn't up to the task of a serious movie. We bought Autodesk Maya, the same software used for movies like Shrek and Final Fantasy. Instead of just jumping into our thesis, we decided to do a test animation to learn how to use the software and what kind of process we needed to follow. Since Josh had recently done a Frankenstein animation, we thought that doing a second on would be neat, so we could more easily compare the two animations and see how much progress we had made.
The goal for the test animation was one month. One month quickly turned into "all of Spring 2007 semester." It still wasn't done, and neither of us had time to work on it much over the summer. I was working in Indy, and Josh was taking summer classes. We started work on it again at the beginning of Fall semester 2007, but quickly got sidetracked. Finally, over this past winter break, we quickly wrapped it up and got it rendered. There are still a lot of problems with it. The monster is unfinished, the lab has no ceiling, some of the wall textures got messed up during rendering, and we wanted to include more clutter in the lab. However, we had to get it "done" and move on, because we graduate in less than a year and a half, which doesn't give us much time to do the actual thesis.
Below are pictures from throughout the process. Each thumbnail is a link to the full resolution image.
An early version of the lab.
The bench and wall, pre-finalized versions.
These are various versions of the monster. I went through several models until I created one I liked.
Two shots of the table.
