Some mucking in maya...

What better way to learn than trial and error. The following example is from sculpting a polygon sphere. I have slowly morphed sections of it to appear to look like the outline of a face. This has very little detail other than its structure, but I now have a better understanding of the sculpt geometry tool and the soft modification tool.

Basic head shape:




Editing using the sculpt geometry tool:




Editing using the soft modification tool:




Some of the short cut keys for these tools are similar to photoshop which made it esaier to understand. For exmaple, when using the scultp geometry tool, togling between holding "Ctrl" and clicking would change which way the sculpture was being modified, either inwards or outwards.


Click on images to enlarge...

Some research books...

One of the BIT lecturers, Patricia, lent me some books about 3D animation including a maya book "the art of maya".

I will use some of these to help understand how to create and develop 3D objects and characters.
These books are:

• the art of maya. Alias wavefront.
• Game Character Development with Maya. by Antony Ward. New Riders.
• Learning Maya 6. Fountation. Another Alias product.
• 3D Creature Workshop. By Bill Fleming.

They are a little dated but still help explain the basic functionality and terminology for maya.

Research ideas about a project..

After looking through a book and DVD set from Su (Pictoplasma maybe??), I found some interesting styles that I liked. Some of these were not 3D but the story line and themes to them were amusing. Some of the short animations from the DVD that I liked are:

Chris Hardling's animation about George learning self defence - This was not 3D but the story line and humour was very well portrayed.

A 3D MTV add - This one was in a very dark room with a high placed TV, the feeling from this was mysterious and kind of weird. But everything had a creapy design to it and looked in place.

Lego space animation - The idea of using "lego" style characters would be easy to recreate and construct as they are all the same style. Lego designs have been used in many ways for games such as Lego racing and the Lego star wars series, so there would be many ways to branch off that.

Comic book lego looking fight - This was a fast paced 3D animation, again using the simple lego style shapes for characters. The detail and flow from page to page was impressive. I am considering this as a possible style for my project.

3D Radio teddy bears - This comedy animation was designed around a English radio talk back show. The look of this seems to be a very casual radio environment with a couple of out-of-place fluffy looking teddy bears, who appear to be the hosts. They have no mouths so all the interaction between the 2 is through facial expression (raising eyebrows, face muscle movement etc). This was an interesting way to go about it. Doing it this way would mean less fiddling around with mouth movements. Mouth movements to a voice over would be hard to do because for each character speaking, the shape of the mouth has to match the sounds of the words spoken, other wise it just looks like a bad Aussie cleaning products add. I am also considering this approach for my project.

3D Robots in the realistic environment - This was very realistic. It would possibly require a lot more knowledge than what I will gain in a semester to understand how to implement. The robots have been drawn overtop of a video, and rendered to look like they are interacting with the other objects in the video. The robots have a sleek realistic look them, with added effects to allow surrounding objects to reflet onto them and shadows cast depending on where they are standing. Eventually, I would like to create this sort of 3D effects and creations, but for now it will be a little bit beyond my knowledge.

More research needs to be done to help develop ideas, styles and what I am going to create.

My very first animation...

Before you learn to walk, you have to learn to crawl. This is my approach to 3D animation. My first animation consisted of a basic NURBS sphere, not rendered any pretty colours or added effects, just a simple sphere which I animated using the time slider to "bounce" up and down.
The animation loops so when run, it looks like a ball continuosly bouncing up and down to the same height. It consists of 3 frames.
Frame one contains the sphere shape at the centre of the grid base.
Frame 2 is the same sphere but moved up vertically.
Finally, frame 3 is the sphere moved back down vertically to its original position but has been scaled to look squished (wider rather that perfect radius all around). This will give the illusion of a physical impact.
After running it for the first time, the ball looked like it was on speed! The key frames needed to be made further apart to make the balls size and weight appearance match its falling and bounce time.
I will look into how many frames per second maya defaults to and how to change it.