Artemis, Apollo and Memnon rig by Ramon Arango will be used for this project as the rigs are professionally made and the anatomy of the character models are athletic with long limbs useful for strong posing.
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I want the work to be loosely based on the performance and not be a direct visualization of it, this is to minimize religious connotation and keep it secular for broader appeal but also be respectful to the cultural heritage of the origins of the performance.
For the reasons stated above the performative format of the embedded video seems appropriate for this project.
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4: Whirling Dervish
Renen Ben Yanay
The two clips above are two animations found online that for research purposes, the first is a 3D animation by a collective of animators and CGI artists, the FX of the dress was made in Maya using nCloth. The second animation is hand drawn frame by frame.
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3. Research: Whirling Dervish
The whirling dervish or commonly known as whirling sufi is a religious meditative practice performed in Sufism a sect within Islam. It is a performative ritual which without context looks like a dance, but the ritual is a form of meditation and worship the purpose of it is to reach a state of “ecstatic trances”.
Practitioners of the whirling sufi dance often wear a dress that elevates elegantly during the dance.
The dance itself consists of continuously spinning around, it’s not choreographed in advance.
The dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy is a dance sequence from the two act classical ballet Nutcracker by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It is a ballet performance that is very dynamic and subtly elegant at the same time. I chose this dance as a potential source of reference for the project due to it’s strong poses and fluid movement.
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1: Initial Idea
My Final Major Project is the culmination of my animation progress on the course so far, throughout the course I have focused on body mechanics and animation. I want to further focus on that and center my project around body movement. I want to animate a dance sequence, emphasizing on strong poses, dynamic movement and timing.
At this stage two dances have been chosen for potential reference, the first is a ballet iteration of the Nutcracker and the second the whirling dervish dance practiced in Sufism.
Shot 1 Background/Scene
The last shot is the same as first one, the same background and scene file was used.
The final rendered film, DPI was set to 70 and resolution to 1080p due to lack of time to render and render farm being to populated. I will render this again in higher resolution and camera settings but due to how close it was too deadline this could not be done before the submission. O
Overall I am happy with the final outcome, if I had more time I would like to add fog and particles to the scene it would add to the tone of the project.
All the backgrounds with lighting and post effect.
The extreme lighting effects such as the glow in shot 6 and the light in the image on the left were produced by manipulating intensity and exposure using a point light.
The floating body parts were animated in two different ways, they were grouped together in different groups based on their proximity to each other and the group was animated either using key frame animation and moving them manually into position or placing pivot in the center and animating setting key on different axis translations. The body parts on top of the pile were animating using method two and the floating head and the smaller body parts in the distance were animated using method one (key frame animation).
A total of 52 individual groups were used in the scene, about a third of them were animated.