Animating the Fish

The fish that we made for a first Maya assignment has had an upgrade! And now it was time to learn animation.

The task starts with constructing the skeleton. Here is the main body of the rig.

Then comes the bones for the pectoral fins. This whole part of the task was relatively simple but good fun.

Here is the finished skeleton. This is the stage where we learnt about the "Paint Skin Weight" tool - using a brush to adjust which areas are effected by a joints movement.

Here is the tool in action. 

Once that task was complete, it was time to start animating. I set the animations of the body to occur at the beginning, middle, and end of the scene, to get a smooth speed and look. The pectoral fin animations occur once every 10 frames.