Telling Tales// Rendering out worries

The first rendering of a scene for this project occurred today,
to my surprise it didn't take hours but in fact 30 minutes to convert the Maya folder into frames. After the render was complete I transferred the digital frames into After Effects to begin the Post-Production side of the project for this segment of animation. I had over stepped my deadline to begin animation, so had to abandon the idea of somehow animating the mouth of the character onto the model that I had within Maya before I rendered it. I was from the very start going to animate the black goo and bubbles featured in our project in photoshop then key frame it up with the Maya animation in AfterEffects, so approached the 'mouth problem' with a similar technique. I illustrated a basic mouth shape in photoshop in a transparent PNG format and keyframed its position, scale and rotation over the Maya animation to move correctly with the characters movements. After having to change the opacity of the illustrated mouth slightly to help it blend into the Maya animation I was very pleased with the outcome!

I animated the 'bubbles' in the same way I animated the characters mouth, by setting keyframes around the model. I also added the Wiggle function to the rotation of the bubbles, to help them look unstable and dangerous; which i knew would be hard to animate in their movements considering bubbles move quite fluidly in the air and aren't the most threatening of objects. Below are a few screenshots of the process of animating the bubbles and mouth: