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March 6
Tail, Skeleton,
Binding, and Skin Weights... Mostly for naught.
I also extruded a semi-curly
tail from the back of the pig.
Tail
Throughout this entire modeling
process, I was constantly converting back and forth between Subdivision
surfaces and polygons to see how my model would look smoothed. I didn't
know about Polygon Proxy mode until later in the process. (However,
using Polygon Proxy mode seems to make things run a little too slow
to be as usabale as I would like)
Eventually, I got the model to a way I liked it and kept it in Subdivision
surfaces.
Finished
Model
Then I moved on to rigging
the character. This was by FAR the most arduous part of the pre-animating
phase of creating the finished product. If I went back and did the same
things again, I'm sure the process would go much quicker now. However,
not knowing what I was doing, I think I ended up painting the skin weights
of the model alone about 10 times. (Try it sometime. Not fun at all.)
Here's my first IK chain for the model, which proved later to
be inadequate.
First
IK Chain
Close-up of Front Leg Bones
Hypergraph view of the Skeleton
I realized that I would not
be able to use the default weighting that Maya's Smooth Bind created.
The pig simply wasn't deforming correctly around the legs and head.
Thus, I began the first of many times painting skin weights.
Skin
Weight Painting
At this point, I naively
thought that my character was ready to animate. So, I tried a walk cycle!
Cycling
in the Graph Editor
Much to my dismay, it didn't
work. Things just didn't look right. My cycle itself needed refining,
but this wasn't the main problem. I was getting strange deformations
with the legs and didn't have much control over the model.
Strange
Deformations - Front View
Back View - Wireframe
Back View - Shaded
I tried repainting the skin
weights in numerous different ways, moving and rotating the joints,
and playing with the controls of the IK chain, but to no avail. I still
got strange deformations. On top of this, the foot did not move correctly
with the rest of the leg. There was no way to make it flat before it
planted on the ground when the leg got to the front part of it's cycle
in a walk.
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At this point, I began
to think more about the environment that my pig would be dancing in.
I did some renders on plain white floors. I also tried creating some
straw with Paint Effects for Stucco to walk through.
I also experimented with
using Poses in the Trax Editor. (However, I didn't understand how
characters worked yet, so the poses didn't do me much good.)
On the 20th I tweaked the
skin weights on the model yet again. Showing my animation of Stucco
walking through the straw drew some complaints about the way his legs
bent.
I also wanted to add some
life to the ears and tail of the model, so I played with adding Jiggle
Deformers to them. However, I ended up not using the Jiggle Deformers
because they didn't look realistic. Even if I turned down their influence
significantly, they didn't seem to be adding much to the animation.
Stucco with Jiggle Deformers
on his Ears
A Jiggle Deformer for the Tail
Today I learned how to
smoothly blend between clips in the Trax Editor. Again, I still didn't
understand how to use the Character tools effectively, but I was able
to use blend clips to make Stucco's head look left and right.
Because I
couldn't figure out poses, I tried creating 1 Frame clips to blend between
to create motion. This was somewhat successful, but didn't look very
good.
March 24
Creating
the Fisher Price Record Player
I had worked on the Record
Player previously to the 24th, but the model I created wasn't working
properly. eBay provided a plethora of pictures that I could use as
reference for the record player.
I tried using Boolean Differences
on a polygonal cube in Maya to get the look I wanted, and seemed to
be having pretty good luck. The record player was taking shape. However,
Maya didn't seem to be able to deal with the Boolean surfaces when
I went to smooth the edges of the record player to get a softer look.
I tried everything I could
think of to keep the shape that I had created. Deleting the history,
merging verticies, converting to a subdivision surface, importing
the polygons into Rhino and trying to filet the edges, etc, etc, etc...
All was to no avail. I couldn't get the look I wanted. So I finally
threw in the towel and re-modeled the whole record player from scratch
in Rhino.
As usual, Rhino and it's
superior NURBS modeling tools were there for me in a pinch. I was
able to use boolean tools, lofting, and an entire gambit of goodies
to get the Record Player looking just like the vintage Fisher Price
that we all know and love. When I was finished, I simply exported
and OBJ file from Rhino as Polygons and took 'er in to Maya!
At this point, I began
working on the texture for the Record Player. After a couple of hours,
it was looking almost like a real Fisher Price.
March 25
Eyebrows
and Mouth Deformations
Today I created a wire
deformer for the mouth to give Stucco a little more expression.
I also added Subdivision
surface eyebrows. These were created from polygonal cubes that were
rotated, scaled, and stretched about until they formed the rough shape
I wanted. After converting them to SubD surfaces, they looked nice
and smooth and ready to animate!
These eyebrows were grouped
with the main pig group, but were not attached to the same surface.
(I really didn't want to repaint the skin weights.) This was
a bit of a problem and a bit of a blessing.
The problem was that, during
animation setup, I would get all of the head movement, rotation, and
stretching (basically, the things that give Stucco life) just right
and then I would have to go back and match the eyebrows to move exactly
with the head. This was a very tedious process going back through
and adding the keyframes.
On the other side of the
coin, having the eyebrows as separate objects and adding movement
to them later allowed me to give them a little more character. If
they moved exactly with the eyes they might not seem as realistic
as how I moved them. For example, if Stucco is looking down then he
looks up suddenly, the feeling of quick motion is emphasized by his
eyebrows moving 2 or 3 frames behind the rest of his head. They have
to "catch up" and tend to bounce about a bit. At first,
I tried to create an Expression that would match the location of the
eyebrows exactly with that of two points on the face. I had mild success
with this method, but ended up being happier with creating keyframes.
I also got fairly quick at it by the end of the animation.
March 26
The First
Shot of Stucco and Progressive Saving
Using the walk cycle I
had already created, I began working on the first shot of Stucco in
the animation. As this was the first animation I did with Stucco (and
the first complex character animation I had ever done), I was learning
the process as I went. I ended up with 5 progressively saved scene
files and approximately 5 hours of work.
Regarding what I refer
to as "Progressively Saved" scene files... When I'm working
on big projects, I like to save very often. I'm in the habit
of hitting save without thinking about it every 5 or 10 minutes. What
I also do is save the scene file with a new name after I have made
substantial changes in the scene. Then I end up with a file listing
like this:
C:\3D\PIG\March26\PigEntrance1.mb
C:\3D\PIG\March26\PigEntrance2.mb
C:\3D\PIG\March26\PigEntrance3(changedTexture).mb
C:\3D\PIG\March26\PigEntrance4(eyebrowWork).mb
C:\3D\PIG\March26\PigEntrance5.mb
Typical
Directory of scene files
I'll try to put notes in
the file name so I know whats different about the later scene files
from the earlier ones. This is also useful if I need to go back and
get something from an older scene file or see how something was before
I changed it. Once a file is completely finished and ready to render,
it goes in it's own directory... i.e.
While this
isn't anything complicated, it does help keep big project directories
managable.
More work
on the first shot of Stucco. (4 scene files, approximately 2 hours)
Still more
work on the first shot. (12 scene files, 5.5 hours)
The first
shot is finally finished after 3 more scene files and 2 more hours of
work. In total, all of the animation of Stucco, his eyebrows, and the
camera took more than 14 hours and I made 24 scene files as I went through.
Luckily, I got much quicker at animating Stucco as I progressed from
here.
April 3
A New Environment,
Lighting, Faked Radiosity, Cacti, and More Animation
I did a render of the first
shot with Stucco walking on a boring off-white floor. I wanted to
create a good environment for him to exist in. The off-white floor
certainly wasn't working.
Thus, I created a new environment
in Rhino.
Next, I set up some area
lights and played with some faked radiosity renders with rayDiffuse
for Maya. However, with the evaluation version of rayDiffuse, I can't
bake the lighting to the geometry. Too bad! It looks really good.
Then I did the final lighting
that I would use for the room. This consisted of three large area
lights and a multitude of small point lights with varying color, intensity,
and fall-off values to create highlights and a much more realistic
and appealing environment.
I also created a cactus
that I thought I might use to spice up the environment in Rhino. (Okay,
it's technically a succulent because I didn't have time to do spikes.)
I textured the cactus in
Maya and added to a scene file to see how it looked.
In the end, however, I
decided that I wouldn't use the cactus because I didn't like the way
the colors combined with the rest of the scene. I played with numerous
different colors for the cactus and tried to tone it down significantly,
but eventually decided that it didn't really add anything too valuable
to my scene.
Then I began working on
the second shot of Stucco in the animation.
From this point, I was
working very hard animating all of the shots and rendering them by
the 10th. The best way to see my progress through these days it to
watch the finished animation ( http://php.indiana.edu/~nshipley/pig/
)
However, a brief timeline
of my progress would look like this:
April 4
- Finish second shot
of Stucco
- Finish shot of Stucco
approaching, sniffing, and kicking the record player
- Shot of Stucco's reacting to the record player stopping
- Close up shot of Stucco's leg kicking the record player
- Begin working on the record player hitting the wall
- Finish shot of record
player hitting the wall
- Shot of Stucco's "Uh-oh" reaction to the kick
- Shot of record player starting up again
- Learn how to use character in the Trax Editor, create Trax character
for Stucco
- Experiment with adding
a sombrero to Stucco for his dancing (including an attemt to use
dynamics and soft-bodies to keep it on his head while dancing. There
certainly wasn't enough time for me to complete this tangent before
the 10th).
- Hours and hours spent on getting the timing just right
for the Mambo.
- Animate a simple sphere moving around to simulate hits in the
song for dancing.
- Video taped myself dancing the mambo on all fours... hehe
- Got Stucco to Mambo!
- Experimented with different ways to shatter Stucco
- Create the shot of the record player going crazy and catching
on fire (got to use expressions for this one!)
- Rendered the still
sequence for the ending
- Render the shattered
Stucco
- Whip together a Money bag in Rhino and render the record player
with it.
DONE!!!
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