Jerad Kiser's | Animated Steam Locomotive

In my introduction to 3D Animation class, in the Video Game Design Program at Wayne County Community College District, I completed from the book an exercise that had me create an animated steam locomotive. The locomotive itself was modeled in Autodesk Maya using various polygon modeling techniques along with NURBS patches. For the animation of the locomotive, I started first with the wheels. Using the connection editor, I linked the rotation of all wheels to that of a single control wheel. Next, joints were created to represent the locomotive's wheel arms and these joints were then grouped under the main control wheel, gaining the wheel's rotational motion. IK (Inverse Kinematics) Handles were implemented at the end of the wheel arm joints in order to convert their rotational movement into a pumping motion. The pump arm of the locomotive was placed under a constraint in its front to back axis, linking it to the end joint of the front wheel arm and constraining it to the proper pumping motion. A similar action was taken to link the back wheel arm to the back wheel. Finally, to finish the animation, an expression was created that linked the rotation of the control wheel to the forward motion of the entire locomotive, allowing the locomotive's complete drive system to be easily set into motion. Smoke from the locomotive's stack was created using a simple particle cloud emitter. The exercise advanced both my modeling and animation skill sets in Maya immensely. I was able to pick up on many new techniques, such as the use of expressions to save time and ease the creation of complex animations. Overall, I'm pleased with the exercise's outcome and I'm looking forward to the increasingly challenging projects of the future.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Maya
• 3D
• Animation
• WCCCD
• Community College
• train
• animated

[akaltaroid]

I think its really nice, but just a bit better lighting is required to be able to see the train details

[iDLLLM2]

I like it, its really nice and smooth