Mouse Trap Animation

Introduction to Digital


For this project I was asked to model and animate a piece of work with the basis of it being the domino effect.
Learning Maya its was my greatest difficulty as it is a very complex program to work with, but is capable of producing some amazing work. I gained the most of my Maya knowledge from either my fellow students, or from youtube tutorials. In one case a friend selflessly taught me the basics of Maya for an hour and a half whilst I jotted down notes to remind me. The idea that I had in mind was to replicate the board game "Mouse Trap" having the game as a child, I have always known of "The Domino effect" just perhaps not by that name. One particular favourite domino effect of mine was in a "Tom and Jerry".

The first thing that I had faced was the modelling, this at first was a struggle, but after getting more used to the tools, and the shortcuts used to reach these tool, modelling became much easier, however very frustrating at times when I couldn't recreate what I wanted to make, however this was my first experience with computer animation so I was never expecting to create a masterpiece. 

1 of 5 videos on youtube that help to teach me how to use the program Maya

In order to aid my modelling, i decided to plan out how I would be creating each piece. To do this I drew at different angles the many different objects that make up the mouse trap board game, this helped me to understand the object better and so who be an advantage when creating it on the computer.

After the modelling came the animating, this I found to be very fun, however, I also found this frustrating at times, for instance at the start where the octagonal wheel is spun, when trying to create this myself, the object always seemed to spin at the wrong angle, making the animating look awkward. In the end I unfortunately left out this particular scene of the animation, as through talking to my peers and other students more advanced with Maya, I still could not find a way to resolve my problem, and I didnt want to submit a piece of animation that was not realistic and that i wouldnt be pleased with. 

I hope to gain a much better knowledge of maya and other 3D programs in the future, as I feel that this is the type of animation that I would want to do the most. One of my first priorities over the upcoming summer would be to obtain a home PC in order to install Maya, as my laptop is not capable of playing the program. I felt this hindered my work due to not being able to use the program at my will, and instead, having to travel 40 minutes to the university, where I wasnt always guaranteed a computer. I did enjoy this project, and although very short was still probably my favourite project. I hope to learn a lot more in the future :)