Animate "Monty" Doing Riverdance

We've uploaded a new animation tutorial to our expanding playlist of tutorials at Vimeo - how to animate a character dancing. The tutorials shows how to employ live action reference, and uses the free Monty rig, which you can read about here.  The purpose of the tutorial is to learn how to import live action reference footage into Maya and use it to create believable, entertaining animation.  You can find the tutorial, which is free for all our students, at our Vimeo Channel.

"Monty" Does Riverdance

Michael Flatley & Riverdance

The tutorial shows how to animate a character dancing, in this case the marvellous "Monty", who will do Riverdance - just like dance legend Michael Flatley.  You can find out how to download Monty here. 

What you will Learn

• How to Import video into Maya so that it can be used for animation reference 

• How to use the live action reference to animate a character dancing

• How to improve upon the live action and add a performance

"Monty" Does Riverdance

Step 1 – find your reference

Monty is going to animate Riverdance, so begin by finding Riverdance reference at YouTube. Download the reference, using the 4K Video Downloader. 

Ideally, use the reference supplied with the tutorial, which you find by eamilaing us at Animation Apprentice. Drop your movie file (it should be a .mov) into your Movies folder in Maya.

Step 2 – Import your reference into Maya

Now import your reference footage into Maya. There are two ways of doing this: as a video, or as a series of images. See below for both methods.

Work Method A  - Import your video into Maya

1. Open Maya, create a project, name it, and set to it.

2. Find a YouTube video clip you like. Then use www.keepvid.com to download the video. OR film your own reference on your phone, and import the video into your computer.

3. Copy the video into your Movies folder in your Maya project (note that Maya prefers .mov files, but if a .mov does not work you can try .avi or .mp4 formats),

4. In Maya, go to panels/orthographic/front

5. Now go to View/image plane/Import movie

6. The movie file should be directly imported into Maya.

7. It will only be visible in the window in which you imported it.

Work method B – Import an image series into Maya

1. First find a YouTube video clip you like. Then use www.keepvid.com to download the video.

2. Now import the video into AfterEffects, Premiere, or maybe Quick Time Pro, and render out the individual frames as tiffs. Note that Maya will not accept underscores in the tiff file names - you will have to delete these.

3. In Maya, Create an image plane 1080x720

4. In Maya, Create new material/Blinn. In the Attribute Editor take eccentricity way down.

5. Under colour/file/select a tiff/

6. In the Attribute Edior, make sure that use image sequence is turned on, then select the first image in the image sequence. You may need to click on image sequence again.

7. Use frame offset to move animation around (say by advancing it 10 frames or so - or whatever you need).

8. Now you can match the animation frame by frame

Step 4 – Import the Monty Rig

Meet "Monty"

The dance tutorial uses the free "Monty" rig which you can download free from HighEnd3D.com. You can see more about how to use Monty here. 

Step 5 – Using spline curves, block out the key poses in Maya

Follow the reference footage, using your thumbnails as a guide to the key positions. Block out the whole shot quickly, roughly one pose every 4 frames or so. Try to do this fast and not get bogged down in details. 

Step 6 – add detail

Once you have the whole shot blocked out, start to add breakdown positions. This stage is called “blocking plus”

Step 7 - Polish

Once you have all your breakdown positions layered in, it’s time to add refinements and detail. Keep your eye on the reference footage and your thumbnail sketches so you don’t lose contact with the original reference material.

Watch the Tutorial Videos Below:

Monty Riverdance Part 1 

https://vimeo.com/734309492

Monty Riverdance Part 2

https://vimeo.com/734310054

Monty Riverdance Part 3

https://vimeo.com/734310309

Monty Riverdance Part 4

https://vimeo.com/734310671

Monty Riverdance Part 5

https://vimeo.com/734310947

To find out more about Animation Apprentice, click here for a link to Frequently Asked Questions. To sign up for our next classroom at Animation Apprentice, follow this link.