Had a brief discussion with my lecturer yesterday and figured out how to fix most of my animations (The only one I left alone is the Turntable animation since the lighting seems alright to me, it after all does show that it is the camera that moves not the object):
Bouncy Balls I simply removed the deformer guides for the animation, but they are viewable in the working file.
Overlapping I knew I missed something and that was altering the darn curves in the graph editor, I still have to get use to adjusting the tangents but as usual, I think I'm slowly getting the hang of it. Well, it should look better now...
Anticipation Well, it's a lot better than the one I had done for the previous post, but I feel that I might have missed out on a few steps my lecturer showed me during class (I swear I should just videotape his demonstrations next time), at least it doesn't drift off like the other one anymore… also, I figured I'd give the red ball a quick animation so it isn't just laying there idle while the green ball is doing all the work.
Pendulum Simply polished up the end a little for this one instead of letting it end abruptly like the last one I had posted.
I quickly did up a storyboard today that I could refer to for tomorrow's workshop, I had to make sure that I chose possible yet still fairly impressive moves for my animation (I of course had to check if they were possible by acting them out myself), and even if I myself am still not able to perform some of these moves, I still could easily refer to the videos and gifs I had gathered together for my reference.
As I was storyboarding my chosen verse, I began to wonder whether it would be possible to cut off the last bit and shorten the animation down to around 17 seconds instead, those first 17 seconds seem to work quite well on its own, and the last bit started to seem a tad redundant (Or perhaps it was because it didn't seem to move along as smoothly as compared to the rest), nonetheless I storyboarded the entire thing, it all simply comes down to what my lecturer and peers think of the matter.
I can't really explain each frame in detail, but basically it simply shows the character confidently handling his weapon and performing a few decent moves, before he drops it and cowers in the corner as the unseen singer/narrator practically puts him down.
And as usual, I drew up some alternate scenes as a precaution:
So these took a little longer than expected to finish… I wasted a couple of days trying to find some proper tutorials and examples to check back on, and finally, it was today that I found this, anyway, here are my exercises, they aren't perfect but at least I gave it a try (And you know yada yada I will hopefully get better as I go along): Turntable
After choosing your desired camera view, go to the view menu and select Create Camera from View, after that, go to the Animate Menu and select the little square to the right of Turntable, to check your direction (Clockwise or anti-clockwise) and number of frames this 360 degree rotation will last for. And there you go.
One thing I keep forgetting is that a turntable animation is actually the animation of the camera and not the object itself, and so several times when I was trying to adjust the speed of its rotation in the graph editor, I instead kept selecting the prop, hoping a graph of any sort would show up. Anyway, to change the speed of the rotation to a constant one, I simply selected the entire thing and changed it into a straight line.
Pendulum
This is where the graph editor gets more involved…
We were fortunate enough to be given a pre-prepared scene file, as all we have to do is to change the rotation values of the pendulum. At the moment, the speed of this pendulum's movement is still too constant, so you know what w-I have to do…
After messing around with the graph editor by stretching the curves a little more and curving the tangents (It's also here that I managed to remember how to use the pre and post infinity tools! Curves>Pre/Post Infinity>Cycle), we get something a little better than before:
Overlapping Action
Apparently this one was already made all ready for us, all we needed to do was rotate it, though I was still able to mess it up this one time… but nothing deleting all the keyframes and starting all over can't fix!
I wasn't sure if the top of the pendulum was allowed to swing along with the rest, and so I made two versions, one with a still top and another that moves along with the pendulum (This meant that I also had to save two scene files for this exercise):
Bouncy Balls
So I started out by putting the two balls into separating layers, so that I wouldn't get distracted and attempt to animate both of them together… after that, I decided to start with the solid ball. Solid Ball
So a solid (Or ceramic) ball couldn't possibly squash and stretch considering the material it is made out of, nor can it bounce back up as high as the height it is dropped from, and so that was the main focus, to create a realistic enough landing animation for the red ball.
It was pretty tough figuring how to get it to dribble a few times after its first landing, I soon realise that adjusting it was much easier by first giving it a basic bounce, before adjusting the height, speed and acceleration in the graph editor.
Rubber Ball
I believe that this one was a little easier, I just needed to show how the rubber ball changes in shape as it bounces up and down, in the end I had to insert in two squash deformers, one at the bottom when it squashes, and another in the centre as it stretches, the centre deformer required some adjustments to the high and low bound values.
After chatting with my lecturer however, this appear to just be one of many techniques in animating a bouncing ball, a deformer can actually be inserted directly into the object, unlike the way I placed it, I shall look further into this during future exercises.
So we start off the same way with this ball like we did with the solid one.
The tangents at the bottom are then sharpened so that the ball will immediately bounce back up.
Before playblasting the final video, I was having issues in removing the wireframe that covered the red ball, while it won't show in renders, it definitely still does in play blast animations. What I needed to do to remove it however was to select the object, go to Display>Polygons>Custom Polygon Display, and just set everything to 0.
I know it could still be done better, I will most definitely improve as I go along. Anticipation
Why did I save the toughest one for last?
So I had initially tried to use Moom for this exercise, and everything was fine (Though a tad tedious) until I reached the jumping bit.
If I had more time, I might have tried to figure out what it was that I did wrong (Maybe he doesn't need to jump that high? That's why he still stays somewhat rooted to the ground? I'm sure Matt can help me out later on) but as I don't have much time and needed to move onto the rest of my ever-growing workload this year, I decided to switch to a ball animation instead, and even that proved to be a pain in the aft for me… Thankfully I found this tutorial.
Apparently I had to key select a number of frames to keep the ball in place (It would always drift off if I didn't). Anyway let's just pretend that this is an animated orange as I really was more focused on animating the anticipation bit than anything else.
It's Mathematics and Physics classes all over again with this session...
To bend an object, subdivisions must first be added to the object (Much like a spine, one is not able to bend without the series of vertebrae that forms it), which can be found in input. Make sure the object is not stretched just yet when adding them in, otherwise the subdivisions will not be spread out evenly (A mistake I had immediately made when we commenced with our experimentation), in some cases that is, as this did not happen when trying it out on my laptop after that.
After that, you can simply bend it by first selecting the faces of half the object and moving and rotating it (A little more tedious than it sounds actually).
… But, if you however wish to make something a little better looking than a bent cigarette, there are the deformers. Deformers
After selecting an object, you can create a deformer (Make sure you are in animation mode though) by selecting the various types in the non linear menu which can be found in the create deformers menu, a handle will then be created right in the centre of the object (Which you can see in wireframe mode) and in the outliner (It will probably be easier to select the handle from there too instead of attempting to pick it out from within the polygon model itself). More than one deformer can be used on an object, so keep playing around! And of course expect some serious mishaps while you are it. Bend
After selecting your choice of deformer and creating the handle within your object, the values in the inputs menu of the channel box can be altered to change the appearance of the object the deformer is practically warping. For my case, I will normally just use the rotate, move and scale tools when adjusting the handle, but things can get pretty messy if you aren't too careful. This tool is most definitely useful for creating cup handles.
When using the move tool on the handle alone.
After messing a little with the rotation tool.
And here it is with the scaling tool.
Note: Values for the low bound will be negative, so if you are attempting to add in a value equal to the high bound, don't forget to add in a "-", otherwise it will automatically be adjusted to 0. Flare I'm still not exactly sure what this one does, so I had to look up on it to understand it better. Flare deformers let you flare out or taper in any deformable object along two axis (X and Z), I'm still not entirely sure what you can make out of it alone… but it seems to make some decent looking urns or slightly deflated balloons. Anyway, I couldn't use any of the tools for this deformer, and so had to make do with typing in the values I wanted instead into the box by the right (Also I know you can actually change the values with your mouse, but somehow that doesn't work for me).
When changing the curve value.
Start Flare Z, End Flare Z will pretty much do the same thing but will instead alter the top of the object. The same effect will take place with Start and End Flares X, except it will be done in direction of its own axis.
Okay, I'm not too sure what happened here when I changed the value of the High Bound.
Sine Sine deformers let you manipulate any deformable object along a sine wave. It is mainly the wavelength, amplitude and offset that should be considered when messing around with the values of this deformer. So let's have a quick refresher on wavelengths, the wavelength of a sine wave can be measured between any two points with the same phase… this should be applicable to here, but at the moment... While this deformer might sound simple, it is actually a lot more challenging to create a wave than one might think, especially if you can't figure out what values to put in, below you will see the monstrosities I have created.
1 wavelength
2 wavelength (???)
2 amplitude
1 offset (Seems to just reverse it?)
Squash As the name suggests, this deformers allows you to squash and stretch any deformable object along an axis, what you pretty much need to do (For more basic uses that is) is to use the scale tool to squeeze and stretch the object in whatever way you want. Squash deformers can also create a sense of volume in an object.
Twist Again it's pretty much as the name suggests, you can give your object a little twist or go all out and make it look like liquorice, once selecting the deformer, simply go to the twist menu in the attributes editor, and toggle around with the start or end angle.
This will make for some good rope modelling.
A little more about this deformer can be learnt from here. Wave So wait… if the Sine deformer creates wave forms… then what of this one? Well apparently it doesn't create those sort of waves, instead, it is able to create a slightly more bumpy or watery texture for a polygon plane or even, create ripples.
And here's a tutorial on how to create a realistic looking wave.
Set keyframes on everything and clean them up, auto key can be a problem and will not accurately translate the movements you want in your animation
Shift and control to select something to be placed in the custom bar
To create equal subdivisions, add them in immediately after the object is created before stretching
Don't forget to delete the history of the alteration when modelling
Graph Editors
The graph editor (Which can be found in Windows>Animation Editors) is an editor that graphically represents the various animated attributes in your scene. The animated attributes are represented by curves, that allows you to create a more convincing animation when altered with, such as the acceleration and deceleration of a pendulum.
More notes will be available in the Study Task 2 post.
Rendering
Rendering an animation in Maya is probably one of the most tedious processes I have ever seen, not only does it take awhile to have the frames converted into a folder of separate images, you will then have to put them all together in After Effects, but thankfully that doesn't take too long.
Extra Notes
1. To create a custom texture, first off, create either a blinn or lambert (Doesn't really matter which one you choose) shader. Next up, create a file shader, a graph should be created in the work area after, and in the seemingly empty file, select it and choose your texture in the attributes editor. Finally, select the blinn or lambert shader, and assign the texture to it.
2. To create some bumpy textures, go to the texture panel in attributes editor and click on the checked box next to the bump mapping section. In the Create Render Node palette, click out one of the textures from the 3D textures section. Once selected, messed around a little more with the values available.
3. Sometimes you wound up creating way too many shaders while figuring out the best one for your object, to clean up your hyper shade workspace a little, simply go to the edit menu and select Delete Unused Nodes.
4. Apparently I have the worst hearing ever since I actually thought I heard my lecturer telling me to try out a water texture for the base when he had instead said wood (How could I actually confuse those two…?). Though honestly, both look pretty awesome:
Thank you Matt! This really looks so much better than the checkered texture.
5. The middle mouse button is able to move objects out of groups in the Outliner.
6. After altering a model, don't forget to freeze transform and delete the history as usual.
7. Press S for key framing.
8. It might help to set in a NURB plane and centralise it to the object you wish to animate.
It might seem a little unnecessary sketching out concepts/studies of Moom (I also find myself wondering just how much of his appearance we can actually alter), but I find myself wanting to give the guy a little more character as compared to what he has at the moment, if I remembered right, aside from being able to move his pupils, I do believe the size of his features can be changed a tad.
It just gave me the chance to draw again I suppose, because I don't think I have been doing much of that...
By the looks of the facial controls, I don't think it's possible to create some of these expressions (Or maybe it's just going to take way too much effort and time, especially for the lip syncing (Great, remembering that just nearly made me cry…)), particularly for this project, body language is truly the main focus for when we are to animate our model's performance.
While I'm still trying to figure out how the choreography will go (I mean I have a rough idea but it will take some time getting it all nicely arranged into a storyboard), I decided to do some quick studies, once again it's the spinning of the staff that will be one of the most challenging parts to animate, but again, I have a back up plan to animate something far simpler if it comes to that.
I'm pretty fond of the ground smashing pose, as well as the crouching ones.
The ones on the left were actually rough concepts for the simplest poses I can think of.
So as I mentioned awhile back, I have gathered quite a few references that I can refer to for the animation, so first off let's start with the animation the song originated from:
"Mulan" to this day remains one of Disney's funniest animated films, it had a wide variety of songs that were all really enjoyable, and perhaps one of its most memorable ones (Aside from "Reflection") is "I'll Make a Man Out of You", featuring a humorous but rather inspiring and heartwarming training montage involving Mulan and the other soldiers who were initially antagonistic towards her, another fun fact is that Jackie Chan had performed the Cantonese and Mandarin versions of this song (Crap, I wish I knew where my Chinese album is now…).
Obviously I won't be copying the scene down to the last detail, I will most definitely be creating a more original choreography for mine, and besides, the verse I had chosen does not show much of the bo staff. I only wish to refer to the scenes where they are still learning how to use it, instead of immediately going for skilful spins and swings… Come to think of it, I suppose this could be of some use too (I know, I know it's a Disney sequel, but it was still pretty hilarious):
And whilst browsing through Tumblr as usual, I was fortunate enough to chance upon these gifs… though I fear that they might be a little too complex to animate (Or maybe this is because, perhaps I might be able to create some simpler moves out of them (Also that's a really pretty blue bo staff he got there~).
While I am planning to keep things simple (Because who know how many times I'm going to mess up over the next few weeks), I saw no harm in looking up more advanced moves, perhaps I might be confident in the next few weeks and will be able to insert them in (Because I was initially planning to go with this sort of tone if I was to animate a more awesome looking weapon demonstration, I mean look at that adorable ending)!
The first thing that came to my mind when it came to searching up references (Aside from the original animation of course) are the incredibly useful weapon demonstrations featured in the "Soul Calibur" games (I wish they had done the same with the "Tekken" games, though I suppose there are tons of reference videos for hand to hand combat without weapons). While once again a little too complex, if we are required to use some camera movements in our animation, I will have these videos to refer to!
The weapon is actually handled wrongly here (Due to some modding done on the recorder's part for entertainment purposes, a fighting style based around the Dao (Chinese sword) was inserted instead), but I felt that her moves are still plausible enough for the staff, and so kept it as part of my references.
Obviously I should refer to this one more as he is actually using a staff, and not a halberd (But I don't really care much for you Kilik…), but honestly their movements aren't all that different from one another, there are only a few tiny alterations made between their fighting styles.
I was going to search for some references of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle's" Donatello (Any incarnation is fine, though I suppose the 80s and 90s versions once again have more simplified moves as they were in 2D and well, the present one is done in 3D… so they will surely all prove to be helpful to me), maybe I will post them up in a future post, but for now, I'm going to do some quick study sketches from what I was able to gather together from these ones.
So I finally had the time to mess around again with the rigged model given to us for this assignment, after familiarising myself better with the controls when modelling my truck and prop, I find it a lot easier now to pose with Moom, though I can't seem to figure out how to move his fingers and make him clench his hands into fists, surely there has to be someway, otherwise, how will he be able to hold his prop? I really don't think we are all meant to animate him holding his prop like a hot potato.
Other than that, the rotation tool seems to be the most used one next to the directional tool, the legs do get a little iffy when I move them with the latter, since they can stretch, it looks pretty unnatural unless I do some very careful adjustments to it.
There is also one more problem, and I can't really figure out how to move the keyframes about, and they seem to disappear after I play the animation or click on a certain frame... and I'm not sure what it is that triggers that.
This is Moom, say hi to him. His teeth will be removed by the next frame, how very kind of me.
Now take a bow Moo-- wait a minute...
Phew, there we go.
I still can't figure out what is the best way to save an animation after, Playblast doesn't seem like the best option, and saving it in separate images for compilation later on sounds terribly tedious, I'm however guessing that I will have to make do with the latter when the time comes, in the meantime, I will try to ask around. Honestly, it's the settings that scare me the most about Maya… and I think I might have screwed up a little with the rendering settings when I was trying to get a better quality video to post here (Hopefully I can reset it later).
So I was feeling pretty nervous when I finally started on this (At least it wasn't the shark one though...), unlike the truck model, I was on my own with this one and had to start from scratch… though I suppose the post title already hinted you on that.
Anyway I just couldn't resist attempting to model an awesome weapon, at the end of this post, I am sure some gamers might be able to recognise whose halberd this was based on… So right, obviously I started off on the easier parts, that being the stuff and little 'ornaments' on both ends, before finally starting on the blade itself.
A little bevelling here...
A little extruding there (My first time trying it too)…
Initially the shape of the blade was going to be a lot more complicated (Like the one I had drawn in my concepts), but in the end, I decided to simplify it, especially after going through the pain or adjusting the edges to be sharper and attempting the blend other polygon shapes into it to actually attach the blade to the staff.
After hours of trying to figure out the deformer bend tool...
The checkered texture is great for presenting something...
I wasted a lot of time trying to find a metal-looking shader for the blade, and couldn't decide between a leather shader and just a plain bling blinn shader for the rest of the staff, in the end I did mix them in, as well as used a ceramic shader for the blue bit at the bottom. Later on I found the metal hyper shader in the material section and just made do with it, none of the tutorials actually worked for me, perhaps this is due to who basic and flat the shape of the blade was, hence why there isn't much of a shine on it... I then made sure that the prop would move together as one whole object for later use, instead of breaking into several levitating pieces whenever it was rotated. As expected, that happened a couple of times, it was only until I freeze transformed, deleted the history and regrouped everything did it finally cooperate with me. Again it was pretty scary as I might have to start all over again if I made a mistake and forgot to backspace in time. I am still annoyed that I can't figure out how to arrange the groups in the outliner, right now there are a number of empty groups connected to the main group which I can't delete for obvious reasons… why can't the objects be arranged like layers???
When it was finally time to render (I might have to re-render this and the truck later on for the submission), I was shocked to see that the blade was missing… but only in some renderers, I was incredibly baffled over what had happened, and would look back and forth to see if my eyes weren't actually playing tricks on me or if I had accidentally used some invisible shader on it which is of course preposterous! Haha!
I wish I could have done a better job with the blade but oh well, next time I guess.
I'm still not entirely sure if this is the render wanted for the submission… hopefully it is.
