Semester Recap

                                     

Progress

It turns out that I bit off more than I could chew. In my project blog I made in the beginning of September I said that I was going to model a character, rig it (both facial and body), and texture it in Mudbox. Unfortunately due to my lack of experience and a numerous amount of problems (3 file corruptions, bugs, etc.) I was able only to model and partially rig my character's body. I had to learn how to use several tools that I didn't know how to use before such as the multi-cut tool, "insert edge loop," collapsing, beveling, and using Inverse Kinematics to rig. There was also a lot of concepts I was unaware of, like topology and the importance of quads. It was quite a bit of information to learn and apply quickly. I'd say I'm about 65% done with this project, but I'm glad I was able to learn from my mistakes and have the opportunity to work at my own pace to make this project the best it can be. I will talk more about this in the reflection.

Process

I had my fellow animator , Erick Vidal,  make me a reference image due to my lack of drawing skills. Here is the character my model is based off of.

The image came out slightly disproportional. Unfortunately, I did not notice until the deeper stages of modeling, so I had to adapt. My file had already corrupted 3 times, and I wasn't wanting to start over. I started out making the torso, arms, and legs, and I used a cylinder to make all of these components. I attached them together by merging vertices and using a number of the tools listed in "Progress" to ensure that the quads were created and kept, for they make more smoother and less troublesome animation and texturing. As the body was coming together, I had an error with texturing, and in trying to fix it, the file corrupted. I didn't make a back up, and I lost about a week's worth of progress. I made it up in about 4 days. Then, when I arrived at more or less the same spot, both the original file AND the backup corrupted. Another four days were lost. Two days into making up the second corruption, the file and its backup corrupted again. Lucky, this was the last time this would happen. It took me about 3 and a half weeks to finish the body. It's late October. 

I made the mistake of modeling the arms vertically instead of horizontally, which would come to haunt me later when rigging.  After taking a day or two to polish the body, I went on to making the head. Making the head was probably my favorite part about making this model. I learned so much and it was incredibly rewarding to see progress. I countered small bugs and problems, but I managed to solve them on my own for the most part. 

The ears were a bit challenging, but I managed to complete them in about 4 days. They came out alright. It's late November, and I am just now starting to rig. This is where the bugs really start to come in. After I set up my joints, I began to parent controls to the IK handles, but for some reason Maya did not want to acknowledge this. The controls essentially did nothing. I asked my Animation teacher, Mr. Netterville, and he could not figure it out. I continued my work and found that Maya had decided to re-orient joints to the most bizzare positions. I asked a senior named Zack, who is experienced in rigging, and he could not figure out the problem. It was more frustrating than the file corruption to be completely honest. 

The control is not moving the IK handles...

After searching for various solutions, I decided to use a "Human IK" rig that Maya provided to rig my character. Here is where modeling my character's arms vertically came back to haunt me. Human IK requires arms to be modeled vertically to minimize issues and guarantee a clean rig. I skinned the rig to the model, and everything came out fine, except the arms. When the arms rotate there were a lot of issues painting the weights to make it look natural. There was always be some sort of inhuman attribute to his movement. It took me about 10 hours to paint weights, I spent around 3 or on the shoulder area itself using trial and error to make it as natural as possible. I had to use the smooth component of the paint weights tool to make it look somewhat natural.

I can say that now I have painted the weights to the best of my ability, and second semester I'm going to come in hitting the ground running, set up the controls and animate this guy. 

Reflection

Looking back, I feel like I took a very long time modeling my character. However, this was my first real character model, and I wanted him to be very very detailed. I think I did a decent job modeling him considering it was my first model, and to be completely honest, I don't enjoy modeling. I find it my weakest point in animation, tedious, and somewhat dreadful. I wanted to learn how to rig and texture. Even though it was very frustrating, rigging was very fun for me. It was peaceful and relaxing.  

   The cool thing about my animation class is that it lets you explore and work at your own pace so you can learn the way you want to learn.  I was so glad to be able to work at my own pace. Even though I don't enjoy modeling, I feel like I've learned so much about modeling, from tutorials and from my mistakes. I'm so much better at it than I was before. I am on a FIRST Robotics team, and as a side project I am modeling and animating our team's logo. The logo took me about 15 minutes to model. Without this project, I feel like would've struggled modeling it because I ended up using a lot of the tools I was first unfamiliar going into this project. I have taken a lot away from this project that I will have to end up applying to future projects whether I like it or not. I can say that I've worked my hardest this semester. Coming into this class I felt like I was going to struggle. I did, but I improved greatly, and I'm happy. I need to be fearless and look into new areas and projects, no matter how intimidating they may seem. If I run into a problem, I just have to be patient and find a solution. I have definitely grown as an animator this semester.

Looking Ahead

Next semester, I am planning on finishing this project, as well as working on various side projects for my FIRST Robotics team. If time permits, I really want to look into special effects and some 2D animation. I really haven't found my niche yet, so I need to keep exploring. I am willing to look into as many areas of animation as I need to find yet. As of now, the area of animation I enjoy the most is rigging, however, the most rewarding is modeling. It feels AMAZING to finish a model. Looking farther ahead, I want to create something memorable, something unique, something that defines me, before I graduate. That is the ultimate goal.

It's been a semester full of ups and downs, but overall it was a fun ride. I learned so much this semester alone compared to the time I spent in Maya my sophomore year. I am really looking forward to expanding my horizons in the world of animation this coming semester. I can't wait for what's to come (Even its more file corruptions... I can just do it over again for more practice).

Rigging: Basics of Painting Weights

Hey guys, in this blog I'm going to talk about the basics of painting weights on a rig. In the left  image I have my model with  a rig skinned to it. If you have a rig but haven't skinned it to your model yet, you can skin it by going to the drop down menu on the upper left and selecting the "Rigging" option. From here go to the top menu, and select Skin->Bind Skin. 

This is how your model should appear when skinned. The joints should be in a rainbow like patter and the edges of the model rather dark. The weight tool allows you to control what joints control what part of your model. You paint these weights, and they can either restrict movement or allow a join to control a part of the model. Lets get into using the "Paint Skins Weights" tool.

The tool can be found under "Skin-> (Weight Maps)-> Paint Skin Weights."












The Tool will appear on your side toolbar as a square with a purple paintbrush. Double-click the tool.

Here we have the Paint Weight interface. There are several options located in this interface that we will go over later. Joints that can be painted will be located under influences, but if we notice, there are no joints found. Why? We need to select our model first, and then go to the paint weights tool.



Now that we have our model selected, we can see the list of joints inside our model, and the area they affect. In this case, I have the joint where the right clavicle should be selected. We can shades of color in near this area. This is the area this particular joint controls when moved. The shades of color resemble how much of this area is being controlled on the scale of black being 0% control, and white, being 100% control.

The blue resembles little control, and the red is near 100% control. For this "tutorial" we are going to go ahead and turn color ramp on. It's more vivid, and allows you to have more control over your model.

This is the join hierarchy. We can select joints and see what areas they affect here.

I am not going to go too in depth with this tutorial, so I will only explain the "paint operations," "value," and the first 3 "profiles."  When you start to paint your paintbrush will have a value set. When you paint, you are technically painting a value over the model. 0.0000 is no influence, and 1.000 is 100% influence. You can select ranges between these values and give some control to the joint. It really depends on what you need. Replace, under paint operation, replaces a value already set on the model with the value on you paint brush. I select a joint, and lets say an area on my model had .5 value, and I want that joint to have no control over that area so I set my value to zero and paint over that .5 area. The color will change to black, and the join no longer has control over that area. "Add" adds value to an area, pretty straight forward. "Scale" subtracts value from an area, and smooth more or less evenly distributes the values, making the paint smoother. You want to try and paint the area around the joint, and get rid of areas that are far from it.


Ok, so now here I have my model, with the clavicle joint selected (in light blue). My brush is a red circle with a triangle like shape in the center. My brush has a value set to zero. Watch what happens when I paint over the shoulder with green.

The area turns black. This shows that the joint no longer controls the side of the shoulder. Notice how my brush got larger. You can hold "B" and drag your mouse to change the size of your brush on the fly.











Here I finish painting over the upper part of the shoulder, but wait. It seems as if I have removed the area around the joint. I want to give it full control, so I am going to add a value of 1.000 and paint over the clavicle. Before I go to the side menu and change the value, there is a way to quickly switch from a lower value to a higher value. Hold "Cntrl" and paint. This changes the value to the "inverted" value, and allows you to paint with it as long as you have "control"selected. For example. My value is 0.000. The inverted value would be 1.000. What Maya does is it takes the inverted value to be the value you have set minus 1. It is a time saving shortcut that is noteworthy.


As you see here I have finished painting the weights around the clavicle. The joint selected will now control the faces in white when moved. This tool is incredibly important for animation, because it allows for cleaner movement and therefore cleaner animation.