In this Maya tutorial, we will use animation and dynamics techniques to create a combat scene. Throughout the lessons we will take a straight-ahead approach to animating a fight scene between three characters, using some basic techniques for establishing timing and camera angles before getting to work. Along the way, we will utilize the spontaneity the straight-ahead method allows in order to experiment with different narrative and choreographical choices for our scene. Because combat scenes often involve the participants being damaged, we will explore different methods for simulating damage on our character rigs, using deformers like blend shapes as well as dynamic elements like particles and lightning effects. By the end of this training, you'll be able to approach any scene requiring character interaction with the confidence to give yourself the freedom to explore different creative options while remaining true to the needs of the story. Software required: Maya 2012.
Introduction and Project Overview Hey everyone, and welcome to this series of tutorials on robot destruction. My name is Brad Groatman, and I've been teaching animation for the past three years. And in this series of lessons, you're going to be using Maya to create this really intense and fun fight scene between the superhero character and two horribly evil robot guards. Now, fight scenes are complex, but the point of this course really is to find a nice, fun way to plan out complex motions without actually bogged down by it. We're going to be using some primitives just to block out the basic timing of the scene, and then we can go from there with a straight ahead animation technique that gives us flexibility and allows us to kind of come up with things on the fly. Along the way we'll be using blend shapes and other deformers to really make the damage our hero inflicts look real. And in keeping with the scene, we'll also be using dynamics to actually make the scene at the very end have that little added bit of pizzazz that makes this combat scene really shine. So, we have a whole bunch of things to do, and let's get started.