*Check out the model I used for this rig! This model was made by paultosca on TurboSquid.com

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/x-free/864961

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The Problem :

For this final project I wanted to create an animation that could be used in a video game. As I started the process of gathering my assets and preparing them for animation I soon came to realize why rigging and animating are divided in the pipeline. I decided I wanted to focus on making a quality rig that would allow me more versatility in animating my character without sacrificing efficiency or readability. One of the biggest problems I ran into while making the rig was keeping track of the many parented elements and making sure I had the correct order of parent to child. When it came time to test my rig with controllers I ended up finding many, many, bugs that needed fixing, many of which the root of the problem was parenting. The second biggest problem I ran into was in the weight painting stage. The character model I chose has many intricate clothing pieces that needed to painted carefully. I had to find a good balance of weight between joints so that when the clothes are pulled they move in a more organic and believable way instead of looking rubbery or being pulled so much the mesh rips.

The Solution :

My first step in the rigging process was to create a flexible rig. One solution to this was to create an IK rig, an FK rig, and a third rig that would have the ability to switch between the two. When done correctly this is an incredibly powerful tool, especially for animators (which I later had the good fortune of finding out myself). The issue with this being keeping up with three rigs and how they are working in tandem. I soon became lost in the ocean of joints and parent constraints, and as expected small details fell through the cracks. As I started the process of connecting the rigs to controllers is when the bugs in my rigs started to make themselves apparent. One of the biggest issues was for some reason on one of my rigs the joints themselves became unparented from each other, essentially rendering my entire rig useless. Once the issue was found this was an easy fix. I found one of the best solutions to this issue was honestly stepping away from the rig for a day and coming back to it with fresh eyes. This allowed me to relook at my hierarchy and connections and figure out what needed to be where and why. Returning to my rig gave me a much clearer understanding of the process, unfortunately this meant deleting parts of my rig and starting them from scratch, but within the afternoon I had almost my entire rig debugged.

Of course any good rig is only as good as the way it’s attached to a mesh, and weight painting was a whole new project in and of itself. One thing in particular with the model I chose was that in some areas where the clothes overlap, the meshes overlap as well. This became a huge problem when weight painting as I would paint the mesh on top, but not be able to paint the mesh underneath. This creates a very annoying problem was when you are moving your rig to test your weights, you get a few random vertices from the other side of the mesh who just randomly decide to join the party. In retrospect, if I was to do this process again, I would split the mesh into individual pieces and skin them separately. This would allow me greater control over each individual piece without worrying about interior vertices. One tool I wish I had discovered sooner that makes weight painting much less frustrating is the Hammer Vertice tool which essential takes any rogue vertex and normalizes it back into place. This tool is a lifesaver when you have that one vertex that is pulled by a joint on the complete other side and instead of trying to figure out which of the many joints it’s attached to, you can just select the vertice itself and fix it. The weight painting overall proved to be a tricky process as I had to figure out how to weight the harder pieces of clothing so that they were affected less and looked more natural when moving. Overall I’m pretty satisfied with the result.

After the hours of rigging and re-rigging, I was finally able to treat myself to testing my rig with a few short animations. Creating the rig itself gave me a much better understanding of the controls and what they were capable of. During the animating process, though short, I was glad I chose to spend more time creating a good quality rig that I can continue to use and animate down the road as opposed to settling for something simpler and more unpredictable.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15Ez_suMuFKzkT-Io7k64qHRMpStdYIsd?usp=sharing

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The problem :

I have never had such a series of spectacular failures as I have with my rig for this project. One of my problems with my rigs was figuring out the parenting and constraints and how to attach the bones to an IK to a controller. Somewhere in those steps something went terribly awry, as when it came to animate my rigs the controllers wouldn’t actually move the components it was the parent of. Of course the issues with the rigging created even more problems in the animation stage, many of which I didn’t discover until it was too late. The principles of animation and the flexibility I had planned for in my rigs would never come to fruition.

The solution :

There are times when problems cannot be resolved, and unfortunately for me this was one of those times. For my rig I recreated it three times trying to figure out how the components were going to work together. In terms of the individual components of the rig, they all work beautifully. When simply moving the rig in the viewport it works quite well. The issues arose when I began to add keyframes. This is where my rig fought me at every stage. Despite having all my controllers parented to a master controller, when I tried to keyframe them pieces of my mesh would simply fly away or cease to move. I even tried to animate the different components in separate Maya files so I could blend them together in the time editor. Even with the master controller having no keyframes in these files, my rig gave me the same issues. After some time away from this project I would like to return to it and try to figure out how to properly rig my components.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HiGyaGneDSIa0uo0ySqYUEg_DW5jY2AH?usp=sharing

Maya 2018 Animation Fundamentals

This course for the most part was a refresher course on concepts we had already covered in class. I did enjoy learning about the time editor and how useful it is for looping animation cycles, blending animations, and exporting animation clips. I especially liked the idea of using the blend animation clips to create a baseline to work from and refine for transitions as opposed to recreating everything from scratch. The last segment about MASH was particularly interesting due to how versatile and how many different effects can be created with its use. I wish the lesson had gone into a little more detail about the MASH feature, but it is definitely something I can find a more robust tutorial for later on.

Maya 2019 Fundamentals : Rigging and Animation

In this tutorial I enjoyed learning about rigging basics and how to use IK handles and controls to rig a complex vehicle. Especially parenting the IK control of the joints of a pipe/cable to the root joint so that when the main component is moved, the cable follows in a more realistic manor. When it came to creating the control curves, I learned that grouping the curve will help maintain the zero’d out values wile still being able to move the curve. Along those same lines, instead of rotating the object and risk rotating the pivot orientation, it is much easier to rotate the control vertices so that the pivot orientation remains zero’d out as well.

The Problem :

Create an alteration of a walk cycle that clearly shows an emotion or personality trope.

The Solution :

Deciding what kind of walk cycle to create was a hard choice. I knew I wanted to choose something untraditional, and finally settled on a confident cool guy walk. One of the main challenges with this walk was maintaining that relaxed and dynamic silhouette, regardless of which angle or stage of the cycle the character was in. I was able to solve this issue but gently turning the stomach and chest of the character upon each step, exaggerating the silhouette from each angle.

Screen cap 1 :

I really enjoyed this scene from the beginning of Howl’s Moving Castle. The first principle of animation I recognized in this sequence was the gentle arc Howl and Sophie follow as the descent from the air onto the balcony. Next is the overlapping and follow through action of their clothes and hair. They follow the principle of slow in and slow out as they land.

Screen cap 2 :

This second screen cap shows the principles of overlapping action and slow in slow out really well in the moving facets of Howl’s castle machine. There is also good anticipation as the castle moves towards Sophie. As the castle comes to a rest, there is a good amount of easing in the mechanisms.

Screen cap 3 :

I love this breakfast scene. The way Howl cracks the eggs into the pan and it falls in with a good amount of squash and stretch and eases into it’s final shape. The way the egg is drawn shows good use of the principle appeal as the bacon and eggs look so tantalizing. Finally I chose this scene to also show principle thirteen, the moving hold, as Howl is portrayed as being perfectly still and composed yet he still has slight movements in his body and hair.

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https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PpAtXb-OdRJmB-PRjYDEa2EmTSEBg8ch

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The Problem :

For this project, we were assigned to choose a scene of our choice and recreate it in Maya. I knew I wanted a challenge, so I chose this stained glass bathroom scene. One of the challenges that excited me when I looked at the reference photo was the odd angle that the light entered the bathroom and reflected off the floors and walls.

The modeling process of the furniture was relatively simple, there were details I had to omit from the furniture in order to save time, however these details can be easily sculpted in or bump mapped in later. One of the biggest challenges I ran into in the modeling process was the stained glass window itself. While the easy answer would have been to simply have a thin cylinder with the designs being a textured image on top, that would have conflicted with the project guidelines of not using images as textures. I had to figure out an efficient yet effective way to model the details in the window.

When the modeling and texturing had been completed, it was time to finally tackle the issue of the lighting. Since 3D space does not have a sun like the one in the physical world, I knew I’d need several lights in order to simulate the rays. My initial thought was the place the lights outside the window and have them stream into the room, however I soon discovered with this method that too many of the lights fell on the window sill, over exposing it and completely erasing all detail while at the same time not lighting the room. After I established a few of my main light sources, I had to figure out how to create the reflected lights seen on the floor and wall, as the few spotlights I had were simply not enough to create enough light that bounced around the room without overexposing one or two objects in the process.

The Solution :

For the first problem, the modeling of the stained glass window, I tried a few approaches before finding one that worked. My first approach was to use the curves tool and create each individual piece of glass between the iron detail work. I quickly discovered how time consuming and inefficient this process was, so I scrapped it and started over. My next approach was to take a circular plane with no subdivisions and cut in the geometry with the multicut tool. I quickly scrapped that idea was well as after a few tests I couldn’t recreate the fine curves and sharp points of the detailing. After my string of failures I had to step back and think what was the simplest way to recreate this window. Instead of trying to recreate each individual piece of glass, I decided to see each component of the window instead. I started by using a curve to create the four petal and five petal flower, and simply duplicated it, making slight changes to each one. I was able to group these together for easy texturing later. I proceeded to follow the same workflow with the leaves. When it came to the intricate vine like detailing, I decided to get a little more literal. I would recreate the line with a NURBs curve, and simply extrude a poly cylinder along it. I figured since this particular mesh was going to be transparent, I had a little more leeway with stacking the meshes and having them intersect.

Moving into the lighting stage, one of my main issues was figuring out how to get the soft reflections off the floors and walls. In order to have the most control over my light source, I decided to light my scene using spotlights. The first few lights I set up were the brightest reflections on the granite floor. I used two lights for this, One of the flood of the soft yellow light, and one of the more intense and central yellow reflection. After these were in the scene, I tried adjusting them in all sorts of angles and positions in order to have the light reflect from the floor to under the circular side table to no avail. I figured the only other way to achieve this look would be to create another light for the wall reflection. This solution worked better than I would have thought, and I proceeded to create an individual light source for every reflected light source. All in all I ended up with a little less than ten lights in order to achieve my desired look.

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The Problem :

This exercise was a particularly challenging one since I was texturing an object without creating UV’s. One of the biggest problems I ran into was I wanted to use Maya’s Arnold renderer, however many of the native Maya procedural textures are not supported by Arnold and therefor could not be rendered out. I had to find a crafty solution around this problem. The second challenge was figuring out how to create the soft blend in color from the dinosaurs spine to the main back of its body.

The Solution :

After much research and trial and error in the node editor, I was able to attach an Arnold projection node to the Maya noise texture and connect that to my bump map node. At this point the texture was rendering, but it was connecting to my unfixed UV’s and made my model quite horrid. Unable to get the normal Arnold projection node to work, I decided to try out the camera projection node instead. That way I was projecting the texture in relation to the camera. This is not ideal as the models texture ‘swims’ as it rotates, but for my purposes it got the job done. The second challenge seemed easy, just use a ramp? This was partially true, and it’s where I started. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the ramp placed just how I wanted on the entire spinal feature. My solution was I actually split my model into three different material regions: The green of the main body, the brown of the spine, and on the few faces between I have my third material with my ramp.

Lighting the mesh was a lot simpler than I thought it was going to be. I started by creating an Arnold sky box to get some basic light in, and made it a soft light blue color. From there I added three directional lights evenly around the model in order to soften some of the shadows, and tinted them yellow to compliment the light from the sky.

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The Problem :

The main focus for these assignments were figuring out not only the proper texturing but also setting up the correct lighting to match our reference photos.

The Solution :

The orange was a lot more difficult that Jupiter, as the orange had many lights coming from all different directions. In order to achieve the proper look I put a base orange color on my sphere and set up my lighting before I messed with the oranges material nodes. After the lights were set I was able to get a more accurate and realistic look. Jupiter was a little easier as there is one main light source. Although in Maya in order to achieve the same look I used two lights in order to make the center of Jupiter a little brighter. Finally for the texture Jupiter was mainly a ramp node with many different colors mixed together.

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The Problem :

For this exercise I was really excited to tackle the main issue : how to create fluid curves seen in the sandal.

The Solution :

Of course I started with curves. I actually made every piece of the shoe from a curve. For the base I made a curve that followed the width and height of the sandal, duplicated it, and simply lofted it. I followed this same procedure for the rest except for the heel, which I used the revolve function.

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The Problem :

This being our first major modeling project, it was key to maintain clean edge flow while continuing to add detail. I found one of the major problems I ran into was moving vertices while in smooth mode, and overcompensating. When I went back to view my un-smooth mesh model I was horrified to find the state of my vertices. Another major issue I needed to solve was finding a good balance between cleaning up small details and moving individual vertices verses when to move on and continue on with the rest of the model. Of course clean mesh is important but there isn’t much of a point if you run out of time and do not finish the model.

The Solution :

My first plan of action before touching Maya was watching the PluralSight tutorial on dinosaur modeling. I learned so much from that tutorial before I even delved into creating the model myself. It was very helpful to see how another artist problem solves and troubleshoots issues so that when you run into them they aren’t something you struggle with. When I finally got into Maya and began modeling myself, I found I used curves far more than I used regular geometry. Of course in the end the model is all polygonal, but using curves to define large chunks of the body saved me a lot of time wile letting me start with a clean mesh.

It was about this point where I ran into my first issue, overcompensating vertices while in smooth mode. Slowly I learned to switch back to polygonal mode and move vertices there before seeing the product smoothed. If I could not achieve my desired level of detail without stretching my vertices beyond their limit, I knew it was an opportunity to add another edge loop or extrusion. Despite being a little rock at first, I found a good balance between working in both modes almost simultaneously as I constantly switched back and forth.

As my model progressed and I began to add more detail, I ran into my second major issue: spending too much time in the wrong areas. I found myself spending a lot of time moving individual vertices minute amounts to achieve the ‘perfect’ edge flow instead of modeling other important components. For this issue again I turned to PluralSight and watched carefully as the artists fixed vertices here or there but only did so as they moved to the next component. After they modeled the next major piece they did some small cleanup to make the new and old vertices flow into each other and then they simply moved on.