Fish Animation

An animation task from a couple of weeks ago. The idea was to rig and simply animate a swimming fish. This was done following a Lynda tutorial on basic deformation and rigging in order to teach us the basics of animation.

Ghost fish!

First a skeleton was whipped up and added to the mesh of the fish model.

During the process areas that were not wanted to be effected by the movement of a joint were "painted out" with a Paint Skin Weights Toll with the value set at zero.

When all of that was sorted out the the fish was simply animated by moving and adjusting the joints and setting key frames. Simple as really.

The finished fish with skeleton and rigging in place.

A shot of the fish some point into its animation process.

Quite fun and fairly easy to do. I hope animation in Maya stays this was, but I have a niggling feeling that it won't...

(It also appeared that my fish was just plain white while the one in the tutorial video was a nice blue a yellow colour. A shame really. I wonder why?)