Animation Using A Pendulum

 

This week we continued to look at different ways to animate things using a pendulum. We were tasked to create an animation of our choosing using any of the animation techniques we covered in the weeks previous - or a combination of the techniques.

I chose to do a classic pendulum animation. While not perfect by any means - I am happy with the results for a first attempt at this animation. For subsequent passes, I plan to refine the timing and work on adding some overlapping action and anticipation.

Doing Some Environment Test Renders

 

I'm currently in the process of modelling and texturing the environment that I plan to use in the short film for my assignment. While not everything is complete yet, I felt it was important to get some test renders done to make sure everything fit together nicely and the textures I had done so far are working properly. As you can probably notice in these renders, it looks somewhat different to the concept sketches from a few weeks ago. This is because I found that some of the models I originally planned to use either didn't work, or would take too long to texture so were swapped out in the interest of time management. Perhaps the biggest change so far is the wall texture. I had originally planned on putting in stars but when I was working on the texture in Krita, I realised it would take so much time drawing and perfecting all different size stars that I made a switch to clouds and was able to complete that much faster.

Another noticeable change from the concept art is that the middle drawer on this dresser is closed, but in the concept art, it's open. This is because I couldn't find a way that it would look when modelled that I would be completely happy with so I have put that idea on hold for now but if I have time before I need to begin rendering, then I will go back and try again. If however, I do not have time, I will still be able to follow the original storyboards with the ball falling down and knocking over the blocks as this minor change will not affect the over all narrative of the piece.

As I mentioned in previous posts, my main inspiration for the environment - and story as a whole is Toy Story and right now, there are a lot of very obvious nods to that on display including posters and even the duvet on the bed all of which I found through a Google Images search. I am hoping to change at least one of the posters on the wall to a piece of concept art I drew for one of the characters so that it ties in better as well as the duvet because in my mind having a Buzz Lightyear one when his character model isn't anywhere in the scene, doesn't make any sense to me - but they will do for now for placeholder images

Something else that I'm still trying to get right is the lighting. Right now all I have in there is some skydome lights and a spotlight under the bed to illuminate the character model that currently resides there. These lighting choices are far from final but were helpful in pointing out problem areas that I can focus on when I'm working on the final lighting let up.

This is also the first time I've brought all of the character models I made into the same scene. Up until now, they had been worked on in isolation in their own Maya files so seeing them all brought into the same scene is a huge step towards getting the project completed. In saying that though, I still have some textures to work on and some models to finish so I better get going on that!

An Introduction To Texturing

Now that we have a good grasp of lighting, we moved on to look at how to texture a model. To begin with this we were asked to take a picture of a flattened cereal box that would later be applied to our models to make them look less like a model and more like a real world object.

Over the duration of the class, we learned where to put the image files on our computers, how to open the texturing window, how to reference the images we wanted to use, how to apply them to the correct plane and resize and manipulate them as needed to get the desired end result. At the end of the first lesson we were able to create and texture a cereal box from the picture we took.

In the lesson that followed, we were provided with textures and asked to follow the steps that enabled us to create the cereal box, to create a dice. Following some trial and error, I was able to successfully texture the dice.

With that area of texturing covered, we moved on to look at how you can paint your own textures. To do this we were asked to create a model, export an image of the UV map of the model, bring it into a painting app of your choice - I chose Krita - paint your design onto it, export it as the same size image that it came out of Maya as and then if it was done correctly, the texture you painted would be applied to your model.

The ability to paint my own textures will be very useful when I begin texturing the models I create for my film as I'll be able to make them look exactly as I envision them and not rely on ones that others have made and put online.

Laying The Groundwork

 

Today was all about nailing down the specifics of what we needed to do for our end of semester Pixar parody film. We discussed the different steps involved in the over all creation process including things like coming up with a workable concept, turning that concept into a rough storyboard, making an animatic, sound design, the different things needed for the character design process, producing the actual film and the deliverables required at the end.

To allow us to get some practice in, we were given 30 minutes to do one of three things from a list of provided tasks. I chose to do a storyboard based on the premise of a dirty cup that was left sitting on the counter that could not fit in the dishwasher and it was afraid it was missing out on a party. An unusual concept but a very fun one to come up with a storyboard for. My storyboard, pictured above covered the main sequences and pivotal emotional moments that I think would be portrayed should this piece ever actually be produced.

Over all, I found the exercise to be really beneficial in  terms of reminding myself how to storyboard and challenging in that for a change, I wasn't drawing my own ideas, but rather based on a provided prompt - something I hadn't done in a long time. It also helped remind me that this is what being a professional storyboarder is - taking someone else's dialogue and bringing it to life for them as one of the first ways of determining if the story works, if it makes sense - which is a very valuable insight to remember, at least in my opinion.

The challenge for myself now is to finalise the story that I want to tell in my film and then start creating a rough storyboard to see if it's achievable.

Love, Death and a Character Sheet

 

So last week I came across the issue of not being able to easily rig and animate my original character Cozmo-E as I had modelled him into a specific pose rather than an 'A' or 'T' pose. I determined that instead of spending potentially hours fixing it and perhaps needing to change the model, I would create a second character and use Cozmo-E in a different way than originally intended.

I then set about creating a new robot, with no new original sketches or character sheet prepared. Instead using the Netflix show 'Love, Death & Robots and the character sheet I had done for Cozmo-E as my inspiration for the new model.

I was able to build something I liked and even managed to rig and animate him but I wanted to go back and create a character sheet for him as I want everything I use in my project to have as much documentation as possible should I need to refer back to it later for clarity or serve as inspiration for something else. With that in mind I spent a couple of hours doing, and redoing the character sheet until I finally got something that I was happy with that I thought accurately represented the character I had created the week before.

Now I just need to start brainstorming ideas of how my two characters will co-exist in whatever scene I create and what else I'm going to want to create to make that happen. It's going to be a long, but fun process of trial, error and elimination until I get to where I want to be in terms of fitting everything into one, cohesive story.

Bringing My New Character to Life!

 

It wasn't easy but I was able to model, rig and aminate a brand new, as yet unnamed, character. As with everything I've done so far, it wasn't without it's problems along the way but new problems just mean finding new solutions!

The problem this time wasn't the modelling part, the unexpected software crashes (that I've become very accustomed to) or even putting in the skeleton - it was actually painting in the skin weights. I encountered an issue where every time I would finish painting a skin weight and move onto the next, the one I had just finished would reset itself and disappear. Now, I didn't notice this issue straight away - I didn't actually notice it until after I was almost finished painting the model - or at least thought I was almost finished. Confused, I went to see if maybe I had hit undo by accident - because sometimes the fastest path to a solution is the path of least resistance. What I should have known is that noting is ever that simple in Maya, at least not in my experience with using the software up to this point.

I spent all hours trying to figure out the issue - painting and repainting the skin weights only to watch them reset themselves over and over and over again. If I wasn't so stubborn I would've given up for the night but I just couldn't stop until I knew what the problem was. This was the last major hurdle between doing the animation and starting a render to see if it worked. It took much longer than I would have liked but I eventually found my issue. I discovered that the max influence when binding the skin was set too high and as a result, was causing the reset issue I was experiencing. My max was initially set to five so I lowered it bit by bit until I got a number that didn't cause a reset - that number, was two.

Where did I have to go to make this change? It was as straightforward as you'd expect. I had to do the following;

Select the object > go to the Attribute Editor > switch to the "skinCluster" tab > set "Max Influences" to a number that worked for this model.

With that problem now solved and the headache now behind me - it was time to do the fun part - an animation! Now, given the issues I had up to this point I didn't want to go too crazy on the animation just in case something else went wrong. With that in mind I did a simple enough animation set out over 100 frames and started the render process.

This took another few hours to complete because I'm not using the best of computers to run Maya but when it finally finished I was able to take all the PNG files I had rendered, compile and convert them into a gif and see the end result. A result, I couldn't have been happier with given all the hurdles I had to deal with on the way. I managed to bring my new character to life!

 

Working Through Some Problems

Picture of Netflix's Love, Death & Robots

 

Ok so, I made Cozmo-E and now I need to rig him. The problem? I didn't model him in a T or A Pose so rigging him is turning out to be pretty difficult.

I have discovered that because I modelled him in a specific pose, adding a rig and controls to him has been next to impossible so far because it just doesn't look right. So, after many hours spent on just as many attempts to make a rig work, I have decided it's not going to happen for me and I need to come up with a plan B because I do not want miss the opportunity to use Cozmo-E.

So what's the new plan? I'm going to make a different, even smaller robot to use in the same scenes as Cozmo-E, sort of idolizing him - similar to how the little green aliens look up to Buzz in Toy Story.

This is obviously unplanned so I didn't do any drawings in advance of making something in Maya - I used the character sketch I made for Cozmo-E as the inspiration for this - as well as the animated series Love, Death & Robots, which I have been watching recently.

So, with no plan, I hopped into Maya and got to work. The building process went okay, there were a few crashes which at this point, I have come to expect on a fairly regular basis. What I didn't expect was for my save file to corrupt itself to a point where it was lagging making it almost unusable. To counteract this, I exported the model from maya and imported it into a new scene as one complete mesh and I can continue to work on it in the limited way doing this will allow. As it turns out, it was a good thing I did this as the original Maya file now crashes the software anytime I try to open it, so while I lost the original file, at least I didn't lose everything.

Now, time to go see if I can rig this model without any issues...

Bringing Cozmo-E to Life

Drawing done, character sheet created, brought into Maya and orthographic view set up - it was time to bring Cozmo-E to life!

This was a challenge. The toughest one so far. There were a lot of times where I was ready to give up on the character and do something that might have been easier to make - especially since I still consider myself to be very much a beginner in terms of 3D modelling.

I started of okay, but still finding it challenging enough - doing all the work in orthographic view didn't help either because this too was different to how I would normally model - using perspective view and rotating the camera as needed. I think I got caught up in the different camera views too much and I was flustered by it to a point where I was splitting my focus between that, and making what turned out to be a pretty difficult model.

When I finally let myself forget about the different viewing angles I was using - I still wasn't really getting anywhere with my model, I just couldn't get it to look how I wanted it to. Frustrated with my lack of progress I stepped away from it for a while and thought about how to 'fix' it so it at least looked something like my drawing. After running through a few different options in my head I came to the conclusion that I was making the process so much more difficult than it needed to be. I kept looking at my drawing and looking at it as 'one' thing - but it's not one thing, it's lots of smaller things that combine to make a bigger thing.

With that in mind I did what I was trying to avoid doing the entire time. I deleted what I had done already, which admittedly wasn't a lot, and started again. This time though, I went into it thinking about the process a whole lot differently. I broke down my character in a way that allowed me to build a very basic version of him just by laying out the primitive poly modelling shapes in a way that would look like him, Now I was getting somewhere,

Did the model look terrible at this point? Yeah. Did it look like I didn't have a clue what I was doing? Pretty much. Did it also lack any kind of detail that might allow you to figure out what I was actually doing? Absolutely. But, the details would come later when I was ready to add them. I had to remind myself that there's nowhere for details to go if you don't have a solid base to work with.

So, little by little I worked on my character. I selected each shape I had placed down and worked on them bit by bit until each piece was modelled into something that more closely resembled my drawing. This was an extremely slow process and I did get confused a lot while I was doing it - I would mix up which tool performed which function and would need to resort to some quick searches to help me out, but this is a learning process and I've definitely learnt a lot up to this point.

Now as things stood, I was pretty happy with where I was at - I had half the model done and there were a few things I was able to duplicate and just reorientate to make the process faster, and as it was late at night, I did exactly that, saved it and shut it down until the next day.

This is when I hit my next issue - when I reopened the file the next day several parts of my model were appearing as black on screen. In order to get a better look at the problem I assigned a temporary material to my model to see what was fine, and what needed to be fixed. Once I did this, I was able to see exactly what parts of the model need my attention. Working my way through the list of potential issues, I was able to determine that to fix the problem with these parts, I needed to go into the Mesh options and hit reverse to flip the 'normals' back around. Doing this one by one to all of the affected areas of the model, I rectified the issue and was able to get back to where I was before the issue began.

All that was left for me to do then was to fix up the positioning of some of the pieces and I would be done. After doing this for quite some time, getting everything just how I wanted it, I was done. I had created Cozmo-E!

The only thing I hadn't yet done was combine everything into one object - but as I still have to rig this character, something I'd never done before, I'm not sure if combining everything is something that needs to be done before or after the rigging is complete. This would be a job for next week when we begin to look at how to rig a character.

Learning Some New Tools and The Next Challenge

Completed Pokeball Model

With the basics under our belts, we moved on to learning some new tools. Today we were going to learn about Booleans, Edge Loops and Multicuts as well as a quick recap of the basics.

Now, while I did use new tools like the Edge Loop to make my lightsaber model a few days before we covered it in class, I didn't go into any real detail on the full capabilities of that tool, or any of the unfamiliar tools I used for that matter - I just figured out what I needed to do to get my model to where I wanted it and that was that.

So, getting a proper introduction to the tool as well as seeing how it can be used depending on what you wanted to do, and then some lab time to practice was hugely beneficial from my perspective.

While I didn't find edge loops too difficult, I can't say the same for things like Booleans and Edge Cuts. It did take my quite a few practice attempts to wrap my head around the new possibilities opened to me with the introduction of these tools.

Much like the week before, the best way to learn something in Maya, is to do something with that new thing. So, the challenge in class today was to use the new tools we had just leaned to make something - make anything we wanted to and see if people could figure out what it was.

I started off simple and made a key just to get more comfortable with the new tools. There were a few times I mixed up what tool did what but I got it eventually. With that done - at least to a point where I was happy to leave it and do something with a bit more of a challenge, I created something new. I decided on a Pokeball from Pokemon. Making this would really force me to use pretty much all of the tools we'd gone over so far, not just the ones we leaned in today's class.

This was, once again, a bigger challenge than I anticipated and I did have to delete some parts of it and redo it a few times to get something I was happy with. After about 30 - 45 minutes, I created exactly what I wanted to, which I wasn't totally sure I could do considering how many times I restarted parts of it.

The timing couldn't have been better either, class was just about to end and with it, the introduction of our challenge for next week's class.

For next week, our challenge is to get comfortable with the new tools we covered today and finish the object we started in class if possible. If you get that done, the advanced challenge would be to take a character sheet - either one from the Internet or an original design, bring it into Maya and model it in orthographic view in advance of our next topic - rigging the character we make.

With that, the class ended and I set my sights on preparing for the new challenge.

A Treasure Chest, Gears and a... Lightsaber?

All the preparation was complete - the research was done and the sketches were completed - it was time to build.

I approached the build process the same way I did with the preparation - start with the chest and gear because it was an easier task to complete compared to the extra prop I was hoping to make. I started with the treasure chest and gear.

This process was pretty quick and straightforward as I was just redoing what I had done a few days before in class - the longest part was fighting with the controls that would bug out sometimes and second guessing myself on some of the choices I was making. Other than that the process of actually creating the chest and gear was going well - add a shape, manipulate, duplicate and repeat until I got to where I wanted to.

With the first 2 props complete, I set about animating it. I chose to do a simple open and close animation as I had never animated in Maya before and didn't want to aim too high only to find myself stuck. Following some more trial and error with the placement of the chest lid that I hadn't noticed before I started working on the animation itself, I eventually figured it out and set something up that plays out over 30 frames.

Once that was done, I added a sky dome light to the scene and set up the render. This is when the auto save feature had saved me from disaster. During the render process, Maya crashed - a lot. Thanks to the auto save I was able to rescue my file from another potentially corrupted original version and in the end, get the render finished. I then used all the images I rendered, compiled them into a GIF and was able to use this to show the animation I had created.

Not wanting to tempt faith with yet another Maya crash, I decided to build my additional prop in its own Maya file, save it and then import it into the scene with the chest for some screenshots of everything together. It was time to build a lightsaber.

Getting Started

Autodesk Maya Logo

This week was all about getting acquainted with Maya, its interface and the basic controls of the software. As someone who has a background in visual effects and compositing, I had some basic knowledge of modelling from college a few years ago going into this so the learning curve wasn't as steep as it could've been.

After relearning the controls a few times - the camera movement took a little getting used to - it was time to try and build something. We started off with a basic block castle using just the primitive shapes and the controls to move the shapes around. Now, while my castle won't win any prizes for creativity - I managed, with lots of trial and error, to do what was asked of me and in the process,  reinforce my knowledge of the interface and the controls.

From here, we moved onto something a little more complicated and that was using extrusions to add additional faces to our shapes with the hope of making some game assets - a simple treasure chest and a mechanical gear. After being walked through the process a few times because the controls for the extrusion technique weren't quite clicking in my head, I felt comfortable enough to give it a go myself and set about making something resembling a chest and gear.

By the end of class I had managed to make the assets required and was really happy with the results, however, just after class ended as I was preparing to save my work Maya crashed and I had lost what I had been working on all morning. It was also in this moment that I discovered that Maya does not save by default like I'm used to with other programs I use so as I prepared to redo everything all over again a few days later, the first thing I did, was turn on  autosave to prevent me losing so much work, again.

With class now over and disaster, basically confirmed, our task for the following week was to complete the chest and gear to get more comfortable with the controls and if possible, add in some sort of animation on the chest and then, make one additional prop if you have the time.

I took a day away from Maya so as not to overwhelm myself but in that time I had been working on some drawings of what I wanted to try and build for the tasks we were given. It was time to get to work.