Q: WHY IS IT SO SHORT?????

A: The assignment was to make a 15-30 second demonstration of a character animated in an environment. If anything I went beyond this because mine is over a minute and has some kind of story. It would have taken me a lot longer (and a bigger file size) to do a more fleshed out story, but that was not the requirement of the assignment. I did get an A though :D

I had barely used Maya when I first started the 3D Animation class at the University of the Arts. The first project was to take something in real life, like an action figure or what have you, and model it. I chose the Burning Gundam because I had a Master Grade model of him, but I was just gonna model the head for the hell of it. It was alright, kind of funk looking. Then I decided I would use that head on a full character, but you know, not the ENTIRE Burning Gundam, that'd take too long...But I caved in and made the entire body according to the specs in the model's manual and remade the head so it would look better. I enjoyed the results so much that I decided to use him in my final animation for the class. I needed to have a character with skin weights though, so I chose another copyrighted character: Barney!

I believe it was back in February when I first started building the Gundam, so it's been a loooong process of learning, trial and error, and experimentation. I still enjoy 2D animation but I would love to continue to learn more about 3D

Modeled, Rigged, and Animated in Autodesk Maya. Some UV mapping too (The calfs were tricky)
Textured in Photoshop
Composited in After Effects