Aaron Kahn

FINA-T340

Fall 2007

Final Project

Reaping Cerberus

The eight-headed Cerberus rears its heads, looking menacing as its eyes are glowing red with furry. The team of reapers sent to bring the beast back to hell is in for one wild night. Standing in their formation, they attempt to absorb the beast’s power and energy to subdue it, but it doesn’t seem to be working. The chains that once held this massive beast are nothing but shambles, and the reapers must create new ones…

This project is a culmination of the work I have completed this semester. To some extent, every project that I have worked on this semester made its way into the final project. The eight-headed Cerberus came from the second project I made, while the grim reaper is an expansion of another project (Figures 1 and 2 respectively).

Figure 1: Wolf Cave Figure 2: Skeleton

In order to truly exhibit my art, I realized the most obvious way to do so would be to take different aspects of previous projects and combine them (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Reaping Cerberus

The goal of this project, for me, was to practice much more with character design as well as skinning and rigging a character in Maya. My interest lies in video games, so I have been doing some character design on the side. One of the characters I was designing happens to be the grim reaper (Figure 4).

Figure 4: The Grim Reaper

In order to make the grim reaper, I started out with the Skeleton from my previous project (see Figure 2 above). I then proceeded to add a robe, hourglass, rope belt, and scythe (Figures 5, 6, 7, and 8 respectively).

Figure 5: Robe Figure 7: Rope Belt

Figure 6: Hourglass Figure 8: Scythe

Although I am only using the red reaper as an example, all the reapers look the same. After the reaper was complete, I duplicated it seven times and altered the color scheme of each one. Originally, the idea for this project was to have each reaper in the midst of a battle with a wolf of the same color. Unfortunately, that idea was not practical to implement. Instead, I decided to combine the wolves (which became the eight-headed Cerberus – Figure 9) into one model.

Figure 9: Cerberus

Upon completion, I positioned everything into the scene. I was very impressed with how it turned out, but something was missing. This was what inspired me to add in the chains, the “dog” collar, and the fire effects. In one of my previous projects, I learned a considerable amount about changing and manipulating fire effects, including changing the color of the flame and the glow intensity (Figures 10, 11, and 12). Finally, after those changes were added, my project was complete.

Figure 10: Fire Attempt 1 Figure 11: Fire Attempt 2 Figure 12: Final Fire

Fundamentally, I was exploring a little bit of what color represents what element, size balance, and death To clarify, each color of the robes and reapers represented a different “element” of sorts. For example, red is fire, blue is water, green is earth, etc. The size balance came into play based upon the idea of balance. One grim reaper wouldn’t be able to stop a beast that large, nor would eight be need to take down a beast that was much smaller (or only had one head). As for the elements of death, all of the items in my project represent death or the underworld at some level. For example, death (personified) is usually represented as a grim reaper. The grim reaper is usually represented as a skeleton wearing a robe and holds a scythe. The hourglass and the rope belt are also commonly associated with the mythos, where the hourglass is an allusion to the temporality of mankind, where the rope belt is sometimes alluded to as the grim reaper’s weapon of choice for killing. Finally, Cerberus, from Greek mythology, guards the entrance to Hades, and is represented with having anywhere from 3-100 heads, although typically it’s only three.

Aesthetically, similar to most of my art, I really have no idea how people will actually perceive this. For example, some may see it merely as project. Others may see it as an epic battle between two opposing forces, while some may see it differently as a allusion to man’s inevitable death and the struggle he faces between the different aspects of his personality relative to outside forces. Since no too people are exactly alike when it comes to how they think and feel about something, I believe people will see whatever they want to see, whether it be at an intellectual, emotional, or spiritual level.

In order to make these pieces, I started simply: a polygonal cube. From this cube, I extruded the faces, manipulated the vertices, scaled, merged, and applied textures. This was essentially the creation process for the skeleton. For Cerberus, I started out with a cube, and repeated the steps mentioned above for the skeleton. However, once I had the wolf completed (with one head), I extracted the head from the body and duplicated the head eight times. Then I reattached all of the heads to the body, and added textures and fire effects. The chain and the bolts for the chain are actually NURBS cylinders. As for the rope belt, I started out with a pipe, and compressed it into itself to make it thin, then extruded certain faces to make the knot, and then meticulously moved vertices in order to make the holster for the hourglass. The texture for the rope belt was created in Photoshop. The hourglass was made by taking a polygonal cylinder and scaling the middle vertices, and then extruding the middle section to create the pillars. The scythe was also made from a polygonal a cylinder, and I extruded the faces near the top to create the blade and the skull. In order to make the scythe, hourglass, belt and robe move with the skeleton, I used the joint tool to create a skeleton for the skeleton. The joint skeleton is also used for the robe so that the robe acts like clothing for the skeleton model.

For this project, I used the following tools in Maya: move tool, scale tool, rotate tool, joint tool, skin tool, fire effects, extrusion, merge tool, mirror tool, duplicate tool, and layers. Here, I will give a brief explanation on how to use three of these: joint tool, layers, and fire effects. The joint tool is very simple to use, but requires a good understanding of how the joints work together. First, create a series of joints that encapsulate the model that requires a skeletal frame. It should be as realistic as possible in terms of how many joints are used. For example, the joints of the hand consist of three separate joints for each finger, one for the base of the hand, and one for the wrist, for a grand total of 17 joints for each hand (Figure 13). The nice thing about using the joint tool is that it allows character manipulation to be much easier.

Figure 13: Skeletal Joints

Layers are a very useful tool that I used extensively for this project. The nice thing about layers is that they allow you to “mask” parts of your model. Similar to their counter parts in Photoshop, the visibility settings can be turned on or off, and it also is set up that should you want the layer visible, but not selectable, you can set that as well. To use these, simply create a new layer (lower right hand side of the Maya GUI window under the attributes editor). Once a new layer is created, select the objects that you’d like to be on the layer, right click on the layer and click “add selected to layer” (The previous images that only have the Red Reaper show this).

For the fire effects tool, it’s relatively easy to use. Under “Dynamics”, go to

effects->solvers, and select create fire. Once the effect is created, you can change the color by editing the ramp color and the crater color under the properties section (Figures 14 and 15).

Figure 14: Fire effects w/o change Figure 15: Fire effects w/ change

To see the 3D model of my project, click here: 3D Project