Modelling skills-constructing a character(5)

After giving skeleton to the demo character, what we have to do now is to make controls for the joints. These controls are going to ease the alteration of the character and these controls avoid chaos in mixing the geometry. 

To create a control, go to NURBS Primitives in create and choose circle for every control even though when the shape is rectangle and the reason for that is circle is a one line shape and has no sides in 2D therefore it will be better than using squares or other shapes with sides.

The other parts are basically just a loop which are dead simple while the eyes, hands, mouth and the feet have to modify the shape in order to indicate the part of the body. After that, colouring left and right in blue and relatively.

Snapping the controls with the joints to make sure the controls represent the correct position and synchronize the movement.

Use the joint tool to make joints that make sense. Looking forward to the next part!

Telling Tales- Modelling test

I am responsible for the maya test part which is very changeling for me and I believe the video guide is going to be really useful. I started with a sphere and simply add on two small spheres and a cone shape polygon to construct the first pig head test. It looks very round and all the parts are elliptical that does not bring out much features of it also as the snout is a separate component of the head, the shading becomes weird as if the light is from different angles.

The second attempt was a funny fail. It looks like an octopus with a really big mouth haha. I started with a cube and extrude the edges but the shape in the smooth preview looks really odd as if its head is squeezed.

The overview is nothing close to our character design but I have gained some good ideas about how to make the model better.

The original design of the pig character. Like how Matt did the demo character, I follow that by drawing out the front and side view of the character in order to model it in both view.

The modelling process is very quick about three hours and I guess I have learnt a lot from the video guides and remember exactly what and which tools to use in order to achieve the shapes I want. The ear is the difficult part because there is nothing similar in the demo character so I did a lot of tests and experiment by bending and altering the edges and vertexes that eventually looks very nice as a pig ear, big and fluffy. I did not combine the eyes with the model because I want to get feedbacks from Matt about this and go further when it is functional.

I think it looks amazing and very close to my design which is very encouraging and exciting! I especially love the eyes and the snout because they are in the perfect shapes and very close to what I was expecting. The hands may need to elongate a bit and so do the legs so as to make it capable to do more actions.

Telling Tales- Useful book: Ideas for the Animated Short

I borrow this book from the library and this is extremely useful and informative. There are chapters about characters, finding ideas, building story and staging etc which is worth referring to later on.

I focus on the chapter on storyboard that is what our team is struggling on and the book explains a lot of rules and instruction when making an efficient storyboard for example reverse shot and over the shoulder.

 "There are exceptions to all rules and times when other factors govern one's choices but usually the orientation of even stationary objects in a shot should remain consistent with other adjoining shots. There is nothing to be gained by confusing the audience or breaking the 180-degree rule when the purpose is to tell your story clearly"

Establishing shot is very important to story and to split the shots like below able the story to be told by only the body language and the facial expression that also develop the story in greater details.

I also find this Cross dissolve suitable for our story where it can be useful to show time-lapse and include few shots in a scene. A cross dissolve will show one shot becoming progressively transparent and fading away as it is simultaneously replaced by the next shot fading in. 

Telling Tales - Storyboard

These are Joe's storyboard of the first event where the pig attempts to escape for the first time. I like it because the style is good and he cleverly reuse the background which I had never thought about. Also the last silhouette scene produces a lot of drama that would visually look amazing on the screen.

I have designed another storyboard since we could not both reach a agreement on the plots and the content and I cut out thumbnails to aid the rearrangement of scenes. At that point, we still want to do three short events that would be squeezed into a minute which I know would be a problem due to the limited time and the huge amount of workload therefore I discussed with Matt while gaining professional feedbacks from him. He noticed the story is way too long and there would be no time to develop the characters and the story. The best way is to reduce the amount of information, meaning only focus on one event. I totally agree with this and Joe does as well and we choose to work on a silly event at the end of all these storyboard.

And here is the rough storyboard based on that short event.

Basically, I want the different camera angles and shots tell the story themselves without much help verbally and to keep the background simple after considering the workload on maya modelling. There are only three main sets of background and two pig characters, the switching day and night hopefully will be easy to do on maya. One thing I concern about this is shovelling action and the last jump out of the ground scene as it seems very difficult to model which need to be discussed with Joe and Matt. I also want to know what Sarah thinks as she is the one inspires this story! 

Character Design-basic ideas

Here are pretty much all Joe's amazing illustration and I am proudly showing them in my blog! We both decided and want to have a style of fiction and very textured but simple and clean. The main character is a young and brave pig which Joe decided to give him a round look that will look cute and easily to model in maya at the same time. I hope maya can deliver this kind of texture and style, I wonder if UV mapping can transfer those perfectly onto the character?

Little pig under the sun. Joe's design is similar to my initial sketch which I am very pleased. He is mostly working on the artistic stuffs like drawing, designing backgrounds and I am working on the storyboard that make us a good team!

Since we have two characters to model from each of us, we add a farmer into the story who will be catching the pig when it is out of the barn. I like C, 9 and H the most (of course these sketches are drawn by Joe) because it would be interesting to only see half of the body of the farm or only the silhouette just like the classical master in Tom and Jerry. The advantage of doing so will be time saving and introduce more thrill to the story but on the other hand the farmer will be less focused and not so challenging. We need to talk about this! 

Joe was taught to do this comic outline in maya which both of us approve to apply this style in out animation! The three shades of colours really dramatic and meeting our style therefore I can not wait to try this on our real character model!

Modelling skills-constructing a character(4)

From the last blog, I have finished colouring the UV map in photoshop and I put the map in the source images file which will automatically detected by maya so I can apply the texture onto the model. However, the 'clothes' is very bad looking as if the character is too fat and there are splits at the joins which happened possibly because I did not colour the map nicely enough? Although I am quite sure that the grids are fully painted in colour and even paint outside the grid...maybe it is because of the background colour? Nevertheless, I understand the concept of the UV mapping and it is a very handy thing when giving the character clothes or features in 2D. Comparing to making a 3D clothes on the character, painting the clothes on him is more convenient and time saving but in contrast the character will be looking less realistic and loss in texture.

I wonder where do the colours of the eyelids gone? I am sure they are painted in the UV map....

Rigging the character

Rigging is basically giving the character bone structures and muscle who would be moving very close to a real person. I have no trouble doing such by studying the video guide and I enjoy the rigging process very much that is fun to know where to put joins and the relationships between them. Clavicle is a new vocabulary I learnt during rigging: 

'Your clavicle is the bone that runs horizontally between the top of your breastbone ( sternum ) and shoulder blade (scapula). The clavicle(also called the collarbone) helps connect the arm to the body '

from Clavicle Fracture - KidsHealth kidshealth.org/teen/diseases_conditions/bones/clavicle_fracture.html

So clavicle is a very important bone that links the arm to the body so we are not just matchsticks man.

The finish look of the rigging!!Hurray!

Modelling skills-constructing a character(3)

Making of the hands, flipping the half of the model, the eyes and UV mapping.

The hand is not as tricky as I thought it would be. Basically, extrude the edges in the right position while giving it nuckels logically and a hand would be form perfectly! I learnt to give it nails by using 'faces' and raise the faces up to make the nails 3D instead of just lines attached on the finger tips.

The man is basically Finished now!!!yeah!!!

I am extremely proud of him and myself. This encourage more maya work from me and modelling in 3D is less intimidating compare to before and Matt's video guide is very useful which worth referring to  later on when I am stuck but I know that is essential to try out maya myself otherwise I would not learn a thing at the end.

 Eyeballs and eye lids are boringly complicated. There are values that I should not change when rotating it and freeze the transformation is a crucial tool at this point as it resets all the value of the sphere and make it what it is….It is hard to explain. Like 3 is not a starting point if the starting value is 0, but the freezing transformation can make the 3 acts as 0.

He looks very scary with no colours on the eyes but I am very satisfied with the eyelids and the mechanism behind it. 

UV mapping drives me crazy…there are so many different buttons, tools and settings which gave me a headache. Thanks to Matt's video, at least there is something I can follow by watching otherwise I do not I would be able to do it just by listening.

The first thing is to select the UV map of the model and cut the map into different parts of the body by selecting the edges and use Cutting UV edges. 

I mess up so much when unfolding the UV map. What I have done was wrongly select the edge loop and could not figure out what is causing this problem. Luckily, Ollie came help and so did James! He noticed what I have done wrong and helped sew the UV map back in just a second. I am blessed surrounded by these maya genies who can save my life and also learn from mistakes.

After producing the UV map, it can be taken into photoshop to be coloured into whatever I want.

I made him a gentle man and hope the texture will be appeared beautifully on his body! At this point, it does not matter neat colouring as long as the grids have colours in and identify which grids are which body part.