Learning to Model: Day 9 FINISHED

Day 9

I created my blend shapes but then hit a brick wall. 2011 Maya has a bug that doesn’t allow you to go into the input > input all settings. On the mesh so I haven’t been able to change the topology. When you make blends they need to be below the skin cluster otherwise you will have your model jumping back to the bind pose every time you push a slider.

I found a way around this by deleting all of my layers, resaving my file and opening it. It worked a charm. I also entered the blend shapes by choosing the advanced settings when setting up the blends and changed the option to ‘front of chain’ which should set it under the skin cluster. This all sounds very complicated and should be very simple but the bug in 2011 made it awkward. The answer is probably getting a newer Maya (Santa?)

So now his is rigged, skinned, textured and have expressions.

Basically he is finished. How has the end result ended up? Well as you can see it’s not perfect but it’s functional.I won't be using this as anything else but a learning tool as there is no way this guy will be in my short (sorry fella) but he was a good start.

I have learnt so much over the last 9 days and I am really happy to have gotten back into this. I’m going to build the next character in my short and then probably revisit King Konglish and do it again.

I realise my babblings probably not very insightful for anyone building a rig but I have written it to keep my sanity and to remember the little problems I ran into for when I try again.

King Konglish v.1

Welcome King Konglish…even if you are just the practice model                    

Learning to Model: Day 8

Obviously this is in the middle of skinning..look at those horrible arms

Day 8

I have finished my skinning, hazzah! Once again I can see all of the mistakes I made with the rigging more clearly but surprisingly there aren’t as many as I expected. Its just great to see him move. Only one more stage and I can get him animated.

The blend shapes is the next thing to conquer but I’m at a loss at how to separate the mesh from the bones to make them. I fear I forgot to separate them at an earlier stage but I need to do a little more research. Its frustrating as I just want to get to it but since he will be a character in a short that teaches kids English I fear blend shapes will be very important.

Time to research!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Learning to Model: Day 6/7

Day 6/7

These two days have blurred into each other. I realised as soon as I started skinning that I’ve made a mistake and put the arm bones the wrong way up so I needed to go back and re-rig but it was very satisfying to have learnt enough over the last few days that I could just fix it myself.

The skinning process is normally something I do in the paint tool but I’ve really started to enjoy skinning purely in the component editor. I think it’s the way forward for me as I understand where I’m headed with it. I can clearly grab a very that’s bugging me and read what’s influencing it. It’s a little bit of trial and error but it makes more sense to me the more I am doing.

I have almost finished skinning now. I just have arms and feet to go (which is still a lot in hindsight)                     

I have unfortunately had a bout of food poisoning from some live squids I was forced to eat at a work function (yuck!) but I have dragged myself onto the computer to get as much done as I possibly can but its been a slow two days.

Let’s hope the rest of the week is more productive and I can start animating soon.

I think I’ll do a quick walk or run test with him to see how everything is working and then start building my next character.

It is so satisfying to be this far into the process. I think its very easy to have big ideas but never do anything about them. Now that I’ve forced myself to do this I think it will be a lot easier in the future to keep pushing forward. Well that’s the general idea anyway.                  

Learning to Model: Day 5 - Skinning

Day 5

Skinning

Today I finished off the rig. I followed a fantastic tutorial here** and at the end felt confident enough to even go a little further and add my own additions to the rig (such as eyebrow bones and ear bones.) This is something I just wouldn’t have done at uni so I already feel more confident in the process. Obviously a project like this is a kind of ‘time will tell’ situation as its only once you start animating and skinning that you see all those faults come to life.

This of course leads us to skinning. Skinning goes hand in hand with rigging for me so when I let out a groan at the idea of rigging I am in fact imagining all of those tiny verts just waiting to be weighted. I also have to apologise as I am writing this as if the people reading this will know what these processes are. In case you aren’t familiar, skinning is the process of adding the model to the bones. This is the process that tells the computer how it is meant to move. In theory it sounds fun, you get a paint brush and you paint on the weights you want using a nice colour graded system but realistically there are thousands of verts all reacting off every bone and it’s a fiddly pain. The advantage of this type of work (in my opinion anyway) is that its one of the rare jobs in Maya that you can bung on a podcast or some music and just listen away while you work.

This is normally the part of the process where all the little mistakes you’ve made along the way start to show. I am prepared for a long graft but I am already excited to see how he’s moving. He is currently block weighted which means I grab each section and give all the verts a value of 1 for the main bone that controls them in the component editor. Now that’s finished I’ll be able to go into the intricate process of painting a middle ground onto other verts. The tricky part of skinning, like animation is that no one notices when its right but every person sees when its wrong. If you were to move your wrist up and down its amazing how much skin moves, it’s this tricky balancing act that makes skinning so hard but ultimately so satisfying. Unfortunately I will have to leave it at the block stage today as my travel blog (so that I don’t bug you lovely people with my Korean and Asian travels at www.doodlezilla.blogspot.com) has a header that I am not happy with and its in need of changing. Did I mention how much I love desk warming?                        

Learning to Model: Day 4

Day 4

Rigging

After texturing yesterday I hit myself as I had forgotten my facial edge loops. I went back and added all the necessary items to give my Ape his smiling features. Then I gritted my teeth and got ready to begin my least favourite stage. Rigging.

Rigging is something you either love or despise with a fiery passion. I remember being faced with a board in university that had so much writing on it to teach us IK that I couldn’t see the white in the background anymore. It was daunting.

When I first started rigging I couldn’t see any artistic talent in it what so ever. It was maths and a process of following a weird recipe to get my character moving but as I have worked with different riggers and seen their skills I completely take back my old opinions. Rigging is a beautiful thing when done right. The facial rigs that you see online these days blow me away and I dream of animating them. It does feel, when you’re learning to rig, that you are fighting against the computer at every stage but once you pass the initial terror it is very satisfying.

Obviously this is a refresher course for me and probably the most important one. I have rigged in the past at different companies but the sheer dread that enters my chest when my boss would even mention me and rigging in the same sentence showed I needed more practice. Its something I plan on practicing a lot this year.

 As the day has gone on I’ve really started to enjoy rigging my character. It might be because I put rigging on a terrifying pedestal, scared to attempt it after the nightmares of uni but it was so much easier than I remember.

There is always a feeling of copying when I rig. I watch a tutorial and copy every word but I feel like a cheat so a lot of the time I try to work it out myself when it goes wrong. When it comes to rigging you can’t copy enough! (As long as you give 100% credit) It’s a little similar to learning to draw, copy until you make it.

The rig currently has ik legs, ik arms and hands. I am yet to attempt the spine and test it all but so far it’s been enjoyable. A little like playing on a frozen lake*. You know it’s frozen (because old men fish on it every day) but there’s still a tiny part of you looking at the shore, even when you are having fun. Fingers crossed it all goes to plan.

*Last weekend I was on a frozen lake in the middle of a forest, this analogy might be because of that, but who knows the mysteries of the human m

Learning to Model : Day 3

Day 3

Texturing.

So today is my favourite part of modelling, the painting. Putting colour to a character always seems to make them jump off the page. I had forgotten every part of uv-ing, or so I thought until I started watching the tutorial and it all came flooding back. My uv-ing was horribly messy and the perfectionist in me is realising more and more as this process happens that I will definitely be redoing King Konglish because the learning curve has been so steep. I want to get all the mistakes out of the way so I can do it properly.

My concept for this character and the short is really simplistic, Pocoyo like colours so I only needed to block colour him in but it was still really fun to get back into painting and uv-ing.

Learning to Model : Day 2

Day 2

Well I started off on the wrong foot , being a fool I followed a tutorial that was just to build a still model and not an animateable one. So none of the limbs were connected. I made them all separate before realising the error of my ways. This means I’ve had to start again and also learn to merge verts again. It is probably a little more annoying retraining than starting from scratch because you know and remember tools but have no idea where they are located. It’s a bit of trial and error at the moment but i'm getting there slowly. The more I practise the more I learn so even if I do end up re creating this fellow about 5 times it will all be worth it.

Learning to Model all over again

The secret to an animators success (unless you are a university prodigy) is to get yourself noticed but with the same rigs doing to rounds on the circuit the best way to get noticed is to build your own unique characters and ideally create a short that will entertain people

That’s what I’ve set out to do.

I have lots of ideas, too many sometimes, but I’ve always needed to rely on someone else to build them before I can animate them so I’ve decided to take the initiative and create my own characters.

Now I am definitely not a modeller. I spent a week creating characters in university and I took to it like a ton of bricks to water. Since then I have managed to feel pretty at home in Maya so I’m excited to give it another shot.

The modelling part I’ve always enjoyed. I like forming characters the same way I love playing with plasticise but the rigging and skinning have been my downfalls, but I am determined to learn.

Today is day one of modelling. I have a few tutorials that are awakening my memory at every step and its exciting to see the character I’ve imagined animating actually start to appear. I suppose the key to modelling is the same as animating. Know where you are going.

I’ve known some extremely skilled animators who can sit with a cube and add vertex’s until their model resembles something beautiful but for us newbies , I need to know my character inside and out before I start or I can stray. The best tip I can give for new modellers is grab a lump of play-doh or clay and make the shape you want in the computer. Having a 3d model in your hand really will help you to see where it is you need to get to. Drawing a turnaround is hard but stitching those drawings together can be extremely hard.

King Konglish is starting to take shape.