Remodelling

Hmm...It turns out most of the sketchy work I did when I started modelling the legoman is unsuitable for use in animating. Extra volume that was hidden inside the main body came poking out in glaring places when I tried rotating body parts such as the arm and legs. I didn't check to make sure that the dimensions are correct in x-ray mode before I began animating. Well, it didn't turn out to be a complete waste of time either. The remodelled legoman turns out to be much better than the one I had. This time the body parts are accurate and I made sure the whole figure is symatrical. The resulting animation was thus much better than before.

Legoman

I think it would be better if the legoman is moved using controls instead of skeletons. Being a legoman, it should be stiff, like a robot. To mirror the original Legoman, the only moveable sections for my legoman are head (Rotation of the neck area), left arm (Rotation of the left shoulder), left hand (Rotation of the wrist), right arm (Rotation of the right shoulder), right hand (Rotation of the wrist), and the two legs (rotation at the groin area).

-Chu Ping

Mr Flour Sack(Late again)

Forgot again to post early sianz. Anyways, the week was quite informative and rather fustrating in order to make the flour sack move. Firstly I have no idea how a flour sack moves, and there is no reference for its movement. When i finally got it to move, it was so like yuck. There was no sense of weight in the animation and it totally looks mechanical. It wasnt easy at all to make the sack move as there were many parts to make it move as it is seperated to at least 3 parts and just making it move a short distance killed me alreadly. Hope Mr Douglas will teach us how to animate a flour sack as my assignment is disarrears now.
-Yong Sen

Use: Move ma Rig to move me(Kenny)

Rigging shows the skeleton of an object or what it seems to be a skeleton. I learnt that people do not normally use rigging to show bones but rather movement or joints. To show like a rib cage where the bones are there but do not have much movement is by the use of painting weights.

For objects like the Lego man, I feel that it is not neccesary to paint weights as it is a solid object. Adding on to that, rigging is also not required for the legoman for animation unless you have loads of time to spare.

For animation, looking at every detail is the key, whether if movements are regular or with effect would determine on the timing and often calculations. To show realism, it is not as simple as clicking frame 24 and rotate the arm up to show movement, it is those little bits in between such as bending the arm before raising it that makes it look natural.

Thus, animation is somewhat similar to what we have done in the City assignment, it has to be planned before executing any actions.

MAYA Week 11(Mock)

Hey im posting again. This post consists of the lessons i have gone through the past 3 weeks.

3 weeks ago, i started modeling the floursack. It started off well but ended like hell. Extruding is unavoidable here, as well as the basic modifications of the vertex, edges and faces, but its ok for me. Therefore, creating the "limbs" for the floursack is quite easy. Here I also learnt about deformers. Although last term Douglas had taught us that, it was here which I first time using it. Deformer was used to shape the body of the floursack. So far I hadn't encounter any difficulties but there is more to come...
RIGGING! It was hell. But it was the most important aspect for animation. With rigging, the "limbs" of any object would be in place, eg. Hands to Forearm to Arm to Body. Without it, the "limbs" would be dislocated from object, or make the animation too fake(robotic movements)!!
Problems I encountered for Rigging are placing the "joints".. There are 4 sticking out "limbs" which are too small to be the whole arm or leg. Therefore I have to imagine the where the knee or elbow is, which is in the body itself, and I always got it wrong as the movement will look weird.

But after the smooth bind, the entire floursack seem to come to live, with bones and joints.

Bounce Ball Bounce.

My chant while doing the ball bouncing tutorial. It wasn't that hard to get the ball bouncing however the real skill comes in when u have to use your imagination to figure out how exaggerate your stretch and squash of the ball should be.It greatly depends on the altitude of the throw the force and of course good animation skills. Nonetheless all the effort was worth while as the squash and stretch factors really enhance the overall animation.

Some guidelines that i have picked up in class was to create my animation with the use of the motion path and the graph editor. These two tools greatly benefited me as they allow me to modify my animation without having to do everything all over again. Particularly the graph editor as it makes the ball bounce look more gradual and less steep providing realism to the bounce. The motion path on the other hand allows me to see the path o f my bounce before playing it in real time thus it saves a lot time.

Overall i learnt quite alot about animating skills that can improve realism which would aid me tremendously in my next assignment.

-Leslie-

Ball Ball Ball

Lets see, finally on time this time. Anyways a bouncing ball is so nice to make(how i wish it was so). It is SO difficult to make the thing just to simulate a real ball and it just takes like very the long just to make it look real enough when it moves. Wonder whether we can just use Mo-Cap for this to make our lives more easier. But if everything was made easy, it is no point doin the thing anymore, hahaha. So now back to the assignement of 2 balls, 1 lego guy and Mr Flour sack. T_T die

Assigment 2

Well, i think i better start posting soon or else i may get a fail in this component.

Anyways, i've decided to start my assignment 2 early and, hopefully, finish it on time. Although this is obvious, i've made a To-Do list.

Which is:
Design the 2 "balls"
Design the "new" legoman (I hate my original one)
Design the "new" Floursack (Same, i hate my original one too. the limbs are too short)
Animate them. (I'm not saying how as i have absolutely no idea yet)

Well, considering my laziness and all, i might do some last minute sloppy work. I do hope i pass this...

-Chu Ping

Rigging of the floursack(Late again)

One of this days, I better remember to just post b4 fri and have to not do it last minute. Anyways, rigging was fun enough and learning how to just make a nice skeleton for our flour sack was alreadly tedious enough and not exactly hundred % sure of whether i know what everything does. But all in all, we are supposed to make a nice skeleton for our flour sack so that it can move, but how it is going to move, i have no idea how to do it with a lego man as well. Need to come with a story board again. Wonder whether maya allows speech bubbles or dialouge? After going thorugh until now, I learn that what I have is totally not sufficient to just do anything at all, hate it. It is just though enough just trying to do a shoulder for just my Exia and it dosent even look like a shoulder, need help badly. Hopefully, I will be able to make my Exia in time b4 the sememster ends as I am rather interested in trying to be tutored by one of the EA top artists but first things first. I need a good grade in IN3D. T_T
-Yong Sen

Rigggining!!!

Just finish this week practical on flour sack. This practical provides me with a indepth view of what rigging does, how it works, and how it relates to animation. I found out that the smoothness and realism of your animation greatly depends on how well the skeleton of your model is created. I have also learn to use various shortcut tools to create skeletons so that i can do rigging faster and more effectively. As for me i feel that rigging is particularly important, as it is the most effective way to manipulate character movement, with IK handlers it shortens the time needed to do animate the character, whats more the final animation is much smoother as of compare to rotating or moving each individual component on its own without the application of rigs in my models.

-Leslie-

The IN3D assignment submission....

Whew, 2 weeks of holidays has passed by and I'm back to the new school term. The city assignment is due and I'm supposed to hand it in. I handed it in....

LOL, it didn't turn out to be this simple.

As it turned out, I did not managed to do enough buildings for my city. Looking at my friends' work gave me inspiration to work harder but it also made me disappointed of my "simple" city. Mr D was very nice to give us another day to brush up on our projects. He also went through the process of how to do an animation by moving a camera and also guiding the camera with a drawn line.

So, with the deadline extended by another day (Tuesday), I rushed through the night to get the city completed. However, buildings that seemed easy to do took much longer than I thought. Modelling more complex buildings like high-class hotels and shopping centres took ages and in the end, I could only managed to finish modelling a few buildings due to adding the extra details.

On Tuesday, the assignment was finally due. Mr D called out names of students for them to put their work in his hard drive. Before, he called out my name, I continued on with it. Mr D was enraged when we did not name the files in the proper naming convention and that the files were all over the place. Unfortunately, I was not done with the final details of the city and added on to his anger by delaying the submission time all the way till the end of the lesson. Mr D was really upset.

In conclusion, I sincerely apologise to all my classmates as they have been reprimanded by Mr D because of my mistake. Most of all, I would like to apologise to Mr D for making him so so upset. I felt that I deserved it and after taking this lesson, I hope I will be more punctual with my following assignment. Thank you Mr D for your extension and guidance on Monday.

-Leonard