My chosen character was a simple Bee. I modelled the Bee using reference images from google as I tried to get the design to be as simple as possible as the objective stated to use primative objects to create our character.
Next was the rigging process. Now this wasn't too difficult since there wasn't many limbs or parts to rig/skin. The model mainly consisted of 1 root joint (the body), 4 legs and 2 wings. At the start, I had a few issues getting the skinning to apply since my mesh topology was corrupt, meaning the entire body mesh was seperated and no vertices were connecting. So this meant when I went into smoothened mode, nothing would happen since none of the vertices were connected to each other.
So in order to fix this, I had to select all the vertices and merge them and that seemed to do the trick. I could now smooth the mesh and unsmooth at will. In addition, this also fixed my skinning problem so now I could carry on weighting the mesh to its rig. Below is a screenshot of the entire rig. I have made an IK for each of the feet and controllers for the joints. I've also named and sorted everything accordingly.
CRITICAL EVALUATION
For my animation, I decided to give a minor scenario and a solution to the end. In this video, we see a Bee trying to escape the downfall of the rain by flying towards shelter. The biggest issue I had was the flight path. Althought it seems easy to just place and keyframe the model whereever and it'll follow, I spent a lot of time sorting out the interpolation and the speed of everything. I had to set the flight path to a Linear interpolation, doing alot of trial and error to see which speeds are constant through and having to rotate the Bee to keep it facing the correct way to give a sense of direction, otherwise without rotational values, the animation would look extremely unpleasing.
But one thing I enjoyed doing were the legs of the Bee. As the Bee flew its path, the legs swayed to indicate a sense of direction. The constant camera movements 'desaturate' the sway but if you notice closely, it's a nice addition to the animation and make's the scene look more busy.
Next were the wings. These were very easy to animate since all I had to do was keyframe 3 points. One for when the wings were in an upright rotation, another one in a downward rotatation and back again for the last. I kept the spacing a frame wide since its not too slow and not too fast but gives just about the right consistancy for the illusion that the Bee is actually flying.
In conclusion, I feel as if I have a lot of space for improvement and for making this animation much better than it already is. The rig itself, I could have more time improving it since the legs weren't working as well as I initially thought they would but overall a decent attempt.
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