Ice Cream Animation

The Project

For this project we revisited a previous project where we modeled a scene inside an ice cream shop. We made a cone inside a cone holder, a scoop and some more ice cream in a dish. We came back to this project after the pen and added a lazy susan that would spin in our animation to display the tasty ice cream.

What I Learned

In the first half of this project I learned a lot more about how to add textures and bump maps to objects. For the ice cream, cone, table and floor I applied a blinn or lambert texture and then added a bump map to them. The ice cream was made with a cloud bump map, the cone with leather, the table with wood and the carpeted floor with gravel. The other objects like the cone holder, scoop and dish had a blinn or phong E material added to it to make it look like shiny metal or glass.

On the second half of the project, we learned how to make keyframes and animate in Maya. First, we had to select and group all of the ice cream and the lazy susan into one group. Then, we opened up the animation settings and made a timeline that had 120 frames and would run at 24 fps. We set our first keyframe at frame one by pressing S on the keyboard. Moving over to the 120th frame, we set another key that had a rotation on the y axis going around 360 degrees for the selected group on the table. By right clicking on key all in the channel box we created another keyframe, if we pressed play the lazy susan now spun all the way around, displaying our models. Our final step was to remove the ease-in and ease-out on the animation so it would play seamlessly. We rendered it and exported it into a QuickTime file in Adobe After Effects. 

Overall, this project was a lot of fun because we have started animating our 3D creations and I can't wait to see what else we can do!