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.

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!

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.