Month: April 2022

This semester, we started off my doing some animation practice. Using a ball and a wall, we were re-introduced to the 12 principals of animation. I enjoyed 2D animation last semester, so it was fun using the same principals in 3D.

I then used the same principals to create this blob jump. Using the controls for this shot were a little trickier than the ball, but I still enjoyed animating a proper character this time.

On week 6, Mike taught us about point and orientation constraints. This was my favourite animation so far. By parenting the wheel and seats to their own controls, and parenting the seats to the wheel, I was able to create a moving ferris wheel being disturbed by the wind. It was also fin to make the ferris wheel move in a loop on Maya by copying and pasting the first keyframe to the last keyframe, meaning while playing on Maya, the wheel never stopped moving.

This week was a little more difficult. We were shown how to parent joints and bind them to a mesh when rigging a character. After doing this, I then parented controls to the joints, so I wasn’t adding keyframes to the joints. I didn’t enjoy painting on skin weights to our mesh’s as when I painted on one joint, the rest could change, so it took a very long time to get them balanced so the mesh didn’t distort or move when a weird way when animating.

I didn’t think I would enjoy creating the Jurassic Park Previs as much as I did. It was very satisfying to me comparing the movements I created with the camera and characters compared to the actual scene in the first Jurassic Park movie. It was a bit tedious sometimes as it took a long time to create. It did, however, make me excited to create my own Previs as it was fun moving the characters without worrying too much about in-betweens and small details.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t complete much of the lighting exercise as Maya kept crashing when I entered render view after adding a new light and changing the intensity. I was able to render a single frame when I turned down the render settings, but at the time our uni computers where we sat weren’t working, so I had to keep the settings very low on my laptop. I enjoyed learning about 3 point lighting for characters and as well as this, I was able to create an Arnold sky dome light along with a spotlight coming through the window. I feel as though I learned a lot through these tutorials, even though it took much longer than expected to practice them.

As I modelled a skull for my 3D digital literacy assessment 1, I was already familiar with the basic shape of a skull. I used the same reference model to create the model. Even though my skull had exaggerated features, such as larger eyes and a smaller nose to make him look cuter, using the 3D model of a skull really helped when modelling mine in blender.

I created a sphere and used the draw and draw sharp tools to create his face at low resolution, then increased the resolution so I could carve out his nose and smooth out the whole skull. I feel my practice modelling skulls before was a large benefit when sculpting this skull, as it didn’t take me as long as I thought it would.

  

Reference:

After exporting the skull as an FBX to Maya, I started modelling the petals. As the petals had to be wrapped around the skull, which wasn’t a perfect sphere, I could not use the duplicate petal tool, meaning I had to model them separately. I used smooth preview and the multicut tool to create the curves in the petals. I wasn’t sure if they needed to be straight for rigging, so I saved them straight down in one file and folded at the bottom in another, so I was prepared for when it came to rigging.

I couldn’t get the shape of the petals just right, so I imported them into blender to smooth the mesh’s, however, when importing them back into Maya, the polycount was too high and I couldn’t reduce it in blender, so I went back to the original file and converted smooth mesh preview to polygons. After receiving feedback from Alec, he said that my petals didn’t need retopologized and I could begin rigging the folded petals once I finished retopologizing the skull head. I also included a short spine connecting the skull head to the flower petals like in one of my previous designs.

Before I retopologized my skull, Alec did show me how to bend the petals without needing to change the shape of the actual petals. By going to deform, nonlinear and blend, I was able to change the low bound, high bound and curvature assets to fold the tops of my petals.

Reference:

To include in our environment, I created a patch of grass that could be placed in front of headstones in blender, then added a green standard surface layer in Maya.

After I uv mapped my character, I imported it as an FBX into substance painter, where I added a candle wax layer to the skull that was recommended by Cloe. Instead of creating actual dark eye sockets for his head, I added a layer of dirt by creating a fill layer and black mask and painting in all the creases on his head.

I still wanted the skull boy to resemble a tulip, so I looked up reference images of red tulips as I wasn’t sure how the red and orange colours in their petals blended together.

Petal Reference:

Alec sent me a tutorial on how to rig my character using NURBS circles and the bends I created before texturing. After parenting controls to each petal and the whole character, I created a new attribute in the channel called fold to each of the petals and set a driven key so when I turned the fold attribute to 0, the petals would unfold and when I turned it to 10, they would unfold, exposing the whole head. I also parented 3 joints and bound them to the spine and skull head, so I could rotate and move the head in a more realistic way.

Once my character was rigged, I attempted light trials so I could see how my textures would look in the final render. I also added blendshapes to the skull, allowing the animator to change his expression to whatever fits the emotion of their scene. I am very proud of the character I created as I feel he is exactly how I imagined him to be and I love how the lighting brings him to life.

Blendshapes: