Learning to animate and model in Maya.
Today was mostly just learning about tiles, and how to set them up in unity. I did not choose the right pictures for my tile map but this is the set up I did, along with an edge collider.
Tutorial Used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on9nwbZngyw&list=PLPV2KyIb3jR6TFcFuzI2bB7TMNIIBpKMQ&index=1&ab_channel=Brackeys
I finished building all of the parts of the characters body over the past few days, focusing on the legs, then face, then head over each day until now. Currently I would like to give him a younger, less creepy face, but would rather currently start working on his clothing. For one of my animation ideas I am going to have two cowboys facing off against each other, and for the other I have a cowboy styled character fighting a more martial artist styled character, so I would like to first focus on getting the cowboy style of clothes done. Once the clothing is done I will likely be deleting a lot of the geometry that would be underneath the clothes, but I want it there for now to give me an idea of the size and shape of different areas on the clothing, and if I make a martial artist character he will have some amount of skin exposed.
The topology is not the best for multiple areas on the body, but it serves the purposes it needs to for now. I may test a rig before moving on just to make sure the body is not too poorly modeled to animate.
Small animation project I made that needed to involve a flour sack both kicking something and falling off of something. The deforms were done with 2 blend shapes and the animation was done with a skeleton rig. The only thing I did not already show in previous posts are the ball animation, which I did with grouping the ball into three groups, one for translation, one for scale, and one for rotation. I used that to scale it properly for each moment in the kick. Sorry for not having detailed blog posts about this project, I was working on modeling a base for a character in my SkillsUSA project.
I have been working on multiple ideas for my skills animation, and have narrowed it down to two ideas.
One would be a fighting scene that would require me to work with more particle effects, liquids, bifrost, etc. It would also force me to learn more about choreography since there would be a lot of movement for the two characters fighting.
The second would be a story based animation that would involve two people, an outlaw and a sheriff, having a duel in a small desert town. It would end with it turning out to be two kids in their backyard imagining the duel, hopefully giving it a cute ending.
I will post a final plan for both animations later on, but currently I am leaning towards the fight animation.
Currently I have started modeling a base character who would work in either animation, though since I started yesterday I only have the torso and arm currently. The geometry on the hand is currently not the best but I have a duplicated original hand that I can edit to fix later on, or I can work on the current hand. Right now I want to see if this hand will rig fine despite the geometry not being set up the best way possible, which I have hope for.
Since both animations involve two adults fighting, I plan on making one model then editing its face for a second character, then simply changing their clothes.
Over the next few days I will try to mainly decide which animation I will go with, work on planning out one or both animations, and possibly work on this model over my free time.
Yesterday we were assigned a flour sack animation, specifically one that included the flour sack falling off of something and kicking something. I decided to keep it simple and just have him kick a ball into a wall, have the ball bounce once or twice, then hit him and knock him off of the table. I have to make the animation 15 to 20 seconds, so he will spend some time before kicking the ball hyping himself up and will fall off the table relatively slowly.
Above is the storyboard I made yesterday, and below are the base scene that I also made yesterday and the sack as is. I may fix up its weights but I am hoping that I can avoid replacing his current rig with a more complex one. As of right now I seem to be able to pose it easily, but I am worried about keeping the legs where I want them.
Today I learned a bit about programming methods, which basically allows me to write out some code and then call it later on as many times as I need without writing all of the code out again. It also allows me to add a return value which I can use after the method has found a final value.
Tutorial Used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPQx0paXrbw&list=PLPV2KyIb3jR4CtEelGPsmPzlvP7ISPYzR&index=7&ab_channel=Brackeys
This was looking at how to write lists/arrays, as well as how to allow someone to add to the list/array while the program is running. The last part was the one in the video, where we simply made a list and removed items from the list afterwards.
Tutorial used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiE0oetGMAg&list=PLPV2KyIb3jR4CtEelGPsmPzlvP7ISPYzR&index=6&ab_channel=Brackeys
Today I learned about using for and while loops. I ended up only posting a video of the challenge since I did it already, which was to instead make a loop that ends once you roll doubles. Luckily it only took me two tries for the video.
Today I finished a video looking at presenting a car, which demonstrated how to add contrast with a background, how to get a overhead light to seem to fully focus on a single car with flags, and how to add lights to the front, back, and side of a show car to make it look much brighter and to show off all of the fine details. Lastly there, I learned about using lights outside of a reflective model to make the model appear to be a light itself with the break lights
Today was focused on lighting phones, where I learned how to generally make a presenting area for showing off any sort of model, which was based around having three large lights (one above, one on each side) and a spotlight aiming behind the model being shown off. Also there was a plain background that curled at the corner. In making it I learned a bit about what settings to turn on and off, though the settings on my version of Maya did not match his, so the end result was not what was exactly intended.
On the second phone render, we worked on lighting in a void type of environment, or one with a very dark background. In it I learned a bit more about getting reflections just how you want them with planes positioned around the phone. It did not go exactly as planned, partially cause I got a headache, and partially because my settings on the planes were different from his, but overall I got a very similar looking phone.
Today we mainly worked with if-else statements and switch statements, with the base tutorial being making a sort of checking program to make sure someone is at least 18 years old and 160 cm tall. I did this along with a tutorial beforehand which I changed to a comment in my script to save. I have not done so yet, but I plan on completing the challenge at the end of the video of making a small sort of math quiz, but using a switch statement that would explain why you may have gotten the answer wrong. It will be very simple, just having a question like 5 * 2 + 3 say “correct” if you answer 13, “incorrect, remember to multiply before you add in a math problem” if you answer 25, and simply “incorrect” if you answer something else.
Jackie Bois Website 