Rationale

In this project my aim was to create a model of a vacuum cleaner and bring it to life through animation. By doing this, I have developed and improved my skills of using Maya effectively. 
 
I intended to give the animation have a silly story, because putting hours of work into creating and animating a vacuum cleaner is already ridiculous, so I decided to exaggerate it. 

Making vacuum cleaners dance is also the best way to meet the requirements of movement, velocity, gravity, interaction, emotion, and props.

To improve it, I would edit the animations slightly to include slower aspects (Wobble while doing the nosestand before falling over, etc.) because it feels like some scenes are cut half a second early. I would also change the text to be more subtle, because it distracts the viewer from the animation.

Final Animation

Final Animation Link

After Effects

I have animated all the scenes I need, and edited it all together in After Effects.

Movement Sketches

I sketched up some character movement development cycles:

Gallop
Slow walk
Ball Spin
Wheel hop
Fast walk
Nose hop

I even animated some to get a better understanding

Animating

 A very basic walk/run cycle sketch, to help visualise how I should key frame it

After many attempts and a few random glitches, I finally have a run cycle for when the vacuum really needs to haul ass. I'm not sure why it recorded with a brown colour, but that's a glitch I can deal with.

Characters

I introduced some new characters for my model to interact with in the animation, I was originally going to have multiple coloured ones but I have decided to make them uniform to make my model have an 'odd one out' aspect.

Here are the elitist vacuums, they will be performing synchronised dancing, with the green model trying to join in but failing.

Rigged

After a lot of complication I have finally managed to get the rig working efficiently, using the skin weight tool to bind it together smoothly. I still need to make a few adjustments and add some controllers for better key-framing, but I am happy with how it has turned out so far.

Texturing and finalising model

After hours of experimenting with mental ray and following tutorials, I have finally found a metal/chrome effect that I think is effective.

 

I've decided to texture the vacuum cleaner as Kirby from the Brave Little Toaster for vintage accuracy and nostalgic purposes.

 

 I'm very happy with how the model looks at the moment, now I need to actually rig it.

Test Rigging

Following an exercise in class let us build our own pair of rigged legs to experiment with.

Improvement in Model

I have improved the vacuum model to make the rigging system more efficient

Model

I have created the base model of the vacuum cleaner, prepared for rigging.

Sketch

Next I sketched how my vacuum cleaner should look like in maya, and to use it as a guide when modeling it.

Vacuum cleaners

For this project we need to select a normal household object. I have chosen to model an old vintage vacuum cleaner because they have an interesting design and have a lot of possibilities for animation.