3D Animation Almost Done

Above is the lamp that I created. The entire animation was done over a period of 2 days. I started out by the modelling the lamp. I started out with low poly modelling. The modelling part was tricky because I wanted to do my own kind of lamp without the use of any reference. The difficult part was designing the mechanism through which the lamp would be able to turn it's head in three different directions - nodding, shaking and twisting. Finally, I came up with the design and modelled it. Once the model was complete, I converted it into a high resolution model using the 'smooth mesh preview to polygons' function.

Next came the rigging process, and the most tedious process because I could not get it right in the first few times. I started drawing the bones and adding IK handles. I used curves to make the controls for animation. Since my lamp had this bend which looks like a knee, I used the pole vector constraint for the IK handle. However, now I could control the direction of the 'knee' but it could not bend proerly as it affected the rest of the bones in the heirarchy. Thus, after a few tries and tweaking the model a bit, the rigging was done and tested it out and it worked fine. I learnt a lot about using the different constraints in Maya to create a good rig. I then attached the rig to the lamp model and got it ready to be animated.

I wanted the lamp to look nosy and restless. Thus, I animated to have that kind of personality. I was supposed to have this lamp composited over the live action footage. Luckily for me, my shot was a static shot which was shot from a tripod, hence I did not have to worry about 3D motion tracking, which I don't know how to do yet. So anyway, I imported a still frame from the live action footage and matched the placement and orientation of the Maya camera to match that of the live action footage's. Once that was done, I applied a background shader to the ground.

As for texturing and rendering, I tried to do UV layout for the base of the lamp as I wanted to put the Crewsade logo that Greg created on the lamp. However, it did not turn out good as it was very small. I took a few snapshots of my room (since where the footage was shot) at different exposure levels and turned them into a single HDRI file. I used this HDRI file and used it as image-based lighting by turning on Global Illumination. This is what it looks like:

Finally, I rendered the animation and composited it over the live action footage. The final footage? Watch it on the D-Day =)