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.

Working on a Character Sheet

The most important part of preparing to make something for this week's challenge was to first choose a character sheet. We were given the option of getting a character sheet from the Internet or creating one for our own original character idea.

I went back and forth on this for a little while but in the end I chose to go with an original character for a few reasons - the main one being that I could kill two birds with one stone and I could use the work I do now in the film I need to make for the end of the year. This would allow me to work on the model for the film longer than if I was to create a character from the Internet, as well as fix any issues or make changes as needed without being under too much pressure.

The assignment for later in the year is to make a Pixar parody so I decided to take my inspiration from Pixar films when working on my character. One of my favourite Pixar films is Wall-E so I knew I wanted a robot, but I didn't want it to move like Wall-E. I want it to articulate more so I have more options available to me later when I'm working on how this character will interact with whatever I else I make for the film.

With that decided I got to drawing and before long, I had a concrete vision of what I wanted him to look like. I put all the pieces I had dreamed up in my head together and created the character I hope to use in my film.

Meet Cozmo-E.

Now, all I have to do is draw him from a few different angles and then I could start working on bringing him to life!