During class we downloaded the Ultimate Walker rig to practice a jumping animation, only this time we were taught how to use the grease pencil tool to create thumbnail sketches of the movement to help work out the timing and spacing before moving the 3D rig. Another method of doing this was to add a sphere and make the frames of the sphere based off of the grease pencil drawings to get a better idea of the movement as the animation plays each frame. The playblasts for the rig with the sphere is shown below:
I tidied up some stuff a bit and made sure Maya wasn’t doing too much of the animating, and I like how it’s coming out so far. The left knee’s movement looks a bit jerky when it reaches the height of the jump, so I need to fix that when polishing the animation. I also need to adjust the timing and spacing using the dope sheet and graph editor.
When using the dope sheet, I encountered an issue when I was trying to move keyframes in the dope sheet with middle mouse as it wouldn’t work. A small white circle kept appearing where the mouse was every time I held down middle mouse, and I looked up my problem and the solution was to press w to make it go back to normal and now it works properly again. For the graph editor, I mainly used tangent – spline to make the top of the jump appear more curved and tangent – linear to make the animation movement faster. Another thing was that I increased the number of frames to 50 and added arc movement of the body coming back up so it’s not coming up too straight or robotic. The polished playblasts are shown below:
As a sidenote, I didn’t adjust the timing and spacing of the sphere in the dope sheet, just the ultimate walker model which is why the timing and spacing is now different between them. On the whole I am proud of the animation since it was my first time animating something with actual legs in 3D and the jump does in fact resemble a jump, but at the same time it’s pretty obvious I’m not familiar with animating in 3D let alone something with limbs because there’s still some flaws in the polished animation. The biggest flaw in my opinion is the left leg freaking out and going backwards at one point as a result of me trying to fix the jerky knee movement and I can’t figure out how to undo it or fix it, but I reckon in the future I’ll get used to animating in 3D and be able to fix potential errors like this should they ever occur.
During the afternoon class, we were placed into our groups and started looking at some rigging videos and doing the exercises to help us get used to parenting, constrains and control curves while we wait for Alec and Aodhan to join our group. Parent rigs aren’t really used for complex animations because if you replace the models in the rig you would have to do the animation again, and is mainly used for simple animations or 3D previs before doing the final animation as it’s quick to do. Constrains on the other hand can be used instead of parenting that way when you replace a shape the only thing you have to adjust is the constrains, which are essentially invisible parents. Control curves allow you to keyframe the curves and not the geometry itself which is good when replacing objects/models for animation as you wouldn’t lose the animation since the animation is on the curves controls.
Halfway through the control rig video, Alec and Aodhan came into our group and when they asked how we were getting on with our group animation we were honest and said that we didn’t get much done in the week because of finishing the modelling assignment and they said it’s fine and that it was to be expected. I showed my victim concept art (original vs new) and said that the original looked like a hammerhead shark which is what EJ told me so it needed fixed. Aodhan said to adjust it a bit so the eye stalks are thinner at the top since that’s what snails are like in real life, as well as adding that we also need to have a final animatic done for next Thursday. Once they left the group, we were discussing whether to make the animatic in 2d or 3d and I asked about who is modelling what character since I assumed everyone who made concept art of a particular character would then model that character since that is what I was planning to do with the victim snail this week, and we also discussed about settling on a style so that the models don’t look wildly different next to each other. We also agreed that none of us should take too much on as we need to make it fair on ourselves as well as everyone else so if it gets overwhelming we should ask someone in the group for help or someone else could take the file and continue from there, which is a fair agreement.
Later in the week I fixed the animatic frames based on Alec’s feedback from a couple weeks ago – 11, 12, 20, 21, 22 and 23 fixed eyepatch to make it filled better. 25, 26 flipped so assassin looks like coming from the left rather than right. 27, 29, 31, 34, 35, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49 swapped side salt packet is on to reflect left-to-right direction while still making salt packet visible to the audience for the wide angle shots in fixed 28, 30. 28, 30 flipped so assassin looks like coming from the left rather than right and fixed the eyes and eyepatch so the missing eye and eyepatch is further away from the audience and is consistent with previous frames of the assassin.
The fixed animatic frames in order are shown below:
I started to model the victim snail in Maya. My step-by-step process for the head and front of body is shown below:
- I make head and front of body using a cylinder
- I add edge loops and scale vertices to fit the concept art reference
- I adjust vertices at the bottom accordingly based on the reference image
- I merge top vertices to centre
- I select top vertex and bevel it and scale outwards and connect the vertices using the multicut tool
- I select bottom vertex and bevel it and scale outwards and connect the vertices using the multicut tool
- I adjust pivot point of head and front of body
I then made the lower tentacles attached to the head. My step-by-step process for the lower tentacles is shown below:
- I make lower tentacle using a cylinder
- I add edge loops and scale vertices to be thinner in the middle
- I select half of top vertices and move them upwards and outwards to better fit inside the body
- I select top vertex and bevel it and scale outwards
- I select bottom vertex and bevel it and scale outwards and connect the vertices using the multicut tool
- I select bottom edges and move them outwards so the bottom of the tentacle is more curved
- I duplicate tentacle and move it to other side of the body and rotate it so that it mirrors the first tentacle
- I adjust pivot point of lower tentacles
I made the eye stalks which are attached to the head. My step-by-step process for the eye stalks is shown below:
- I make eye stalk using a cylinder
- I add edge loops and scale vertices inwards so the bottom vertices are thicker than the top vertices
- I move and rotate vertices accordingly based on the reference image
- I select half of bottom vertices and move them downwards and outwards to better fit inside the body
- I adjust pivot point of eye stalk/upper tentacle
I made the eyes and eyelids as well as pupils attached to the eye stalks. My step-by-step process is shown below:
- I make eyelid using a sphere
- I select top vertex and bevel it and scale the vertices outwards and connect the vertices using the multicut tool
- I select bottom vertex and bevel it and scale the vertices outwards and connect the vertices using the multicut tool
- I duplicate sphere and scale it inwards to create the eyeball
- I delete front faces of eyelid so the eye is open
- I select the outer edge loop and scale it inwards so there is no gap between the eyeball and eyelid
- I duplicate the eye stalk, eyelid and eyeball and move them to the other side of the head
- I make pupil using a cube and scaling it so it is the appropriate pupil size
- I duplicate pupil and place it on other eyeball
My victim snail so far is shown below:
I’m quite pleased with how it’s turning out so far, especially the bottom of the snail and how I managed to do the eye stalks as well as the eyes and eyelids and I’m eager to get started on rigging the snail when I finish.
References Of The Week
