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!

 

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.

Preparing For The First Challenge (Again)

After the problems I experienced last week when I was saving my work and realising that auto save is not enabled by default, I immediately set out to enable that feature during the project set up phase in Maya. That was the easy part - now for something slightly more tricky - actually making something, or rather two somethings.

To recap, our challenge is to make two game assets - a treasure chest and a mechanical gear. Once we have that done and we're comfortable with the controls, the chest needed to be animated to show it opening and closing and if we really wanted to challenge ourselves, we could build one additional prop of our choosing to go with it.

As I was doing this outside of class time I decided to take a different approach to how I was going to design and build what I wanted to build. I've always been someone who has to put my ideas down on paper before I commit to starting anything because it helps me sort through the chaos, gives me more time to think about what I'm doing and sometimes, see potential issues before they happen in hopes it makes the process of actually creating them smoother. With that in mind - it was time to draw.

I started by drawing the 'easier' stuff first - some treasure chests and some gears that I could use as inspiration when making my model - I also added some notes to the side for things I might like to add to the model when building it if I thought it would look good. With those done reasonably quickly it was time to think about what I wanted to make to go with these assets.

I knew I wanted something completely different to the required items, something that would really challenge me to get the basic controls down and perhaps force me to use controls we hadn't looked at in detail yet. So I did exactly that - I chose sci-fi, I chose something futuristic, yet retro at the same time - I chose, a lightsaber.

Lightsabers are not something I draw everyday - or at all really so before I even thought about sketching out an idea, I looked up a ton of reference images because I wanted it to look similar to the ones used in the movies, but I also wanted to put my own unique spin on it.

There was a lot of trial and error involved in doing these sketches but I eventually got to a point where I was happy with what I had and set my sights on actually building in Maya.