The next stage for us was to then begin designing our ideas and experimenting more with our options. We then split up each area we needed to focus on, one or two on character design, one on storyboarding and one on the animatic.
I chose to do the designing of the football, including its decaying stages and experimenting whether we could add legs and arms or any facial features to try express the emotions more. The image below is one I found could work with our story but as a group we thought the human like features wouldn’t work with our characters and so we decided to keep the model plain, and show emotion through the decaying ball plus added lighting and different weather to show the length of time that’s passed.
From here I done some sketches of deflated footballs as well and the colour scheme we should go with.
Following this I completed some concept designs of where our ball could end up and examples of some camera angles.
However, the one we ended up picking was Cains, shown below:
From my sketches I began modelling the football and texturing it. I followed a video by 3DWolf on Youtube.
Firstly I held down Shift and the Right Mouse button, and scrolled down to the soccer ball option.
Once created I used the radius option to increase the ball from 1 to 1.5.
From here I then held the right mouse button to bring up this menu, and selected the edge option.
Holding Shift and the right mouse button I was able to open up this menu below and select the detach components option. This allowed me to select individual faces rather than the whole football.
By then selecting the smooth option it applied more faces to my model. From here I simply selected 2 divisions instead of 1.
Next I selected the model, opened the Deform option and scrolled down to the sculpt feature, then I selected the box to the right. From selecting the box it provided a few settings I could alter, and so I increased the Max Displacement to 0.750 which smoothed the edges of the football.
Following this I held down Shift and the Right Mouse button to select the extrude option. This changed the appearance of the ball to a darker colour and gave me a panel with more settings that could be altered. In these settings I had to change the Local Translate Z option to -0.06 and the offset to -0.02.
Then by selecting the object again I went into the Mesh Display option and selected Reverse, which returned the ball back to its normal colour.
From here I selected a five sided face on my model, held down the right mouse button, and chose the Select Similar option. This made it a lot easier selecting the rest of the faces.
Next up was to assign materials to these faces. Holding the right mouse button I brought up the menu again and selected Assign New Material. From here I noticed I didn’t have the same materials shown and so I simply used Phong E, which seemed a shiny material. Then I changed the colour to black.
Next I clicked on the invert selection tool which simply swapped whatever was selected to everything else. I then repeated the previous step but this time added a whiter colour.
This ball will be used in our 3D previs, made by Cain, just to give an example of positioning and angles, from this I will go back in and sculpt the ball further to show each decaying phase.
After choosing our final concept, we then prepared for our next presentation where I had to create a plan of what needed to be completed over the Easter break. I planned for us to complete any final tweaks to the Football, the rain/snow test animation, finishing the 3D Previs and texturing. I also experimented with the possiblitiy of adding eyes to our football but with feedback from both Alec and Aodhan we made a decision not to include them.
After our second presentation we all chose which areas we would be most confident working in, I chose our weather scenes. Firstly I created some colour pallets for each season of the year and use them to paint the image plane that would be behind the scene.
I saw that rain effects could be created inside Maya. I found some videos and created a test run of a simple plane and making the rain collide with the ground. The one I followed was by a YouTuber called
Mike Hermes, his video was really simple to follow and the end test came out great.
Following this I created the backgrounds of each season in the 3D previs Cain had set up.
Once I added these in I created directional lighting and used the eyedropper tool to colour the lights the same as my background.
After creating my four seasons in Maya, my attention turned back to the football. I still needed to deform it and texture it. However, when I began sculpting in Maya the skeleton underneath blocked it from moving and created what’s shown below:
After getting some feedback from Alec and Henry, Henry sent me a link to another model football that he thought would work better, and so I repeated nearly the same steps as before with some slight changes to produce a better model to sculpt with.
Alec told me to be able to sculpt my model I would have to reconnect the faces back together again by using the connecting pieces and merging the verticies together. Alec also provided a video which really helped in understanding what vertices pair together. However, after a while of repeating it became very simple and didn’t take up too much time to do.
One button Alec showed me was a tool that just showed the faces that were selected and so made it so much easier to connect each face together, firstly by two faces then connecting them to another two and so on.
Once I created this ball I began sculpting and created three decaying models:
However, whenever I tried to apply any textures on Substance Painter my computer continued to crash so Samantha was able to texture the ball for me and sent it back to me to upload to my scene.
Once I got these back I set them up in my scene.
The last thing I created was the rain effect in one of the seasons, I simply followed the YouTube video as well as Alec’s and produced an effect we think works well. I did struggle creating the rain as the file for our work so far was large it took longer for my computer to load in everything and try to animate the rain.
Articles & Videos:
Maya 2016 tutorial: How to create rain with nParticles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY66aqxTr4k
Autodesk Maya Tutorial: How to Model A Football/Soccer Ball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmJmL2WiIQY
How to Model and Texture a Soccer ball in Maya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY66aqxTr4k