We didn’t stick to everything that was suggested to improve our animation but we decided to fix the head turn and the rock pieces.
Siobhan added a keyframe to the head turn to rotate it and make it more natural. She also animated the resized rock in the second scene as it was too distracting.
Dylan made the rock smaller and the other one that Theia nudges bigger.
I stayed behind to render the scenes out and fix any little isssues and put them in after effects for dylan to work with. He put in the other scenes and did samples with the fireflies turning at the end. He also put the music in again but the firefly bell sounds were off so Courtney fixed these.
Courtney also did her own samples of trying the fireflies out in maya like her other animated one.
Graph Editor Fix: I quite like working with the graph editor. It helps smooth out animations but I really do need practice in this area so I’ll definitely be going through all of these again for the next project.
Adding an In between keyframe:
Fixing:
Arc needed for torso and head turn:
Fixing:
Moving holds needed:
Moving Holds are similar to a slow in/out movement. It’s a term coined by 3D animators to describe subtle movement which is often followed or preceded by a fast action.
Adding them:
I tried to make the rig sigh in frustration and do a quick head turn…if you can imagine it rolling its eyes afterwards.
To create an Inverse Kinematic chain you can do the following:
• Create a joint chain with the Create Joint tool • Make sure to add a slight translation in the chain in the direction you want the chain to bend.
• Select create IK Handle tool – Skeleton >> Create IK Handle – Click on the start of the joint chain and then on the end or last joint you want to affect in the chain.
Creating Parent constraints
You can solve this by:
• Creating a NURBs circle and snapping it to the relevant joint or IK handle
• Freeze the transforms for that circle >> Modify Freeze Transforms
• Select the NURBs circle then shiI select the corresponding joint/IK handle
• Go to Constrains menu >> Parent Constraint
Parenting Joints
Problem with skin weighting:
We were given the option to solve this by selecting vertices, going to window, general editor, component editor and smooth skins. I also attempted to use the paint skin weights tool.
From Alec’s solutions:
The paint skin weights tool lets you use maya’s brush tool to change joint weight values by paining over vertices on your mesh.
This is represented visually on the mesh in black & white, where black is a weight value of 0 (no influence from the selected joint) and white is a value of 1 (total influence from that selected joint).
The component editor lets you manually enter values per vertex or over a large number of vertices in a spreadsheet style layout.
This is a very powerful tool for getting precise weighing on vertices.
Select the vertices you wish to edit >> general editors >> component editor >> smooth skins tab
I tried solving this: I think and hope that the eye was animated with it because i did check.
Blendshapes:
This Challenge was to create 2 blend shapes for this character. The Blob_GRP group is duplicated and the mesh is adjusted using the mesh components (verts, faces etc) and then shift select both groups and then shift selecting the original group and then create a blend shape deformer:
Animation menu >> Anim deform >> Blend shape
Creating a lattice deformer: I didn’t get to finish mine but Alec created some helpful notes.
• Select the mesh and goto Rigging menus >> Deform >> Lattice
• You can adjust the number of divisions in the option box.
• Right click on the lattice and select Lattice Points
• Select one or more Lattice points then create a cluster from them
• Rigging menus >> Deform >> Cluster
• Create NURBs circles and snap them (v) to the clusters, freeze transforms and parent constrain them to the cluster
I really think these little experiments help us as I had no clue what to do sometimes but I figured them out in the end. I think they helped with our models in our animations as we now know what may causes little issues.
Problems:
Fixing them: I made a go at most of them. Others were harder. We had to add edgeloops and faces to most. We also had to change the normals on faces and layout uvs. With the checkerboard, we can check if any UVs are stretched and adjust them within the UV layout. With the crazy spiky model we had to make it symmetrical so had to straighten up the middle edgeloop then mirror the geometry over.
So we were told we had to model the buoys outside our college and would render and texture them during class, however we only got around to modelling them and I just finished the last model. They were simple enough.
I used the images Alec took as they were better quality and simply used a cylinder polygon tool at the bottom, deleted the faces at the top and extruded the edges upwards…eventually bridging the top back together.
The little experiment helped me get back into the flow of modelling.
Screenshots of working on the buoys: I didn’t include the little details as these could be added with textures in the future.
Abigail Gelston 