Month: January 2022

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Virtual Trajectories – Final Thoughts

Animation is still not my strong suit.

But, I have learned a lot in this module.

My virtual trajectories project definitely had its ups and downs, not to mention PLENTY of issues to make completing it a heavy challenge even with help. However, I now know to some degree the steps and requirements needed to design, model, rig, and animate my own character, which is definitely an incredible life skill to have in the industry.

Animating by hand is a skill that definitely still eludes me though. I definitely think without the help from the mocap data we recorded, I would not have been able to get this done on time. Kelvin was also an amazing help with my project and I owe a lot of solutions to the problems I ran into to him.

There were also some outside issues that made completing my project a bit more tricky. My significant other – whom I haven’t seen in two years due to COVID – was visiting during the final weeks of the project, which definitely made it hard to want to put attention to Maya work over her. Thankfully she was very understanding when I decided to sit down and work hard on my project for a few days.

To conclude, I can safely say I owe a lot of the strength my project has to the help I got along the way, but now that I know what to do, I am confident in saying I have some ability to allow me to create and animate a character I need for any project in the future.

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Virtual Trajectories – Rigging and Animating

Kelvin taught us two different ways of rigging up our characters. Placing the points manually to make a skeleton and connecting them by hand, or by using the quick rig system which I ended up doing.

My character with a rigged skeleton

After getting the skeleton working, I began trying to apply the Mocap data supplied by Billy during one of the in-person classes to the rig.

This caused problem after problem.

To start, I was initially trying to apply the mocap animation to my handmade skeleton. This failed to work multiple times until Kelvin suggested the use of a quick rig.

Then, multiple parts of the model began failing due to weight paints affecting them. The staff and the scarf were the two biggest issues regarding this.

Multiple different skeleton points began greatly affecting the scarf

At this stage of my project, I was reliant on a lot of help from Kelvin. After sending over my file, he was able to get the scarf working, and came up with an idea of separating the staff section of the model to make it its own poly, and then attach it to a point on the rig. Not only did this work for the staff, I was also able to apply it to the scarf section as well, and get the animation looking tolerable to begin with.

From there I needed to tweak the mocap data a bit to remove points where the model had heavy clipping and also try to alter it as best I could to fit the image I had for what the animation was supposed to look like. Once altered, and rendered out, this was the final result of my hard work.

  • The animation portrays the character calling out for anyone nearby, and when they realise no one is nearby, they become sad.

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Virtual Trajectories – Animation Basics

In year 1, we began learning a bit about the basics of animation. However a lot of what we did use premade animations and simple techniques overall. I still 100% consider myself a beginner on the side of animating anything, and this was pretty apparent when we began learning how to animate in Maya.

A lot of sources have stated that Maya is the ‘industry standard’ for a lot of people when it comes to animation. I can definitely understand this, with many tools and options being available for people to use to perfect their animated characters. However, for someone who has never animated in his life, the number of options quickly overwhelmed me.

For one of our first lessons, we were tasked with animating a sack. Thankfully, it came pre-rigged and ready to work with, but this still didn’t make the job any easier for me. We were asked to try making the sack show emotion, watching a few cartoons and other media to outline the basics of how animation principles work. After a lot of difficulties, I was able to make this:

I tried to make the sack look sad/depressed, having it take a big sigh out before slumping over. I added a small bit where it would look around to see if anyone cared, but then go back to slumping over. While I was given positive feedback regarding my depiction of the sack, I still think I could have done better, with the idea of what the sack feels like being hard to read without me stating it directly beforehand.

Animation is something I definitely need to work on.

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Virtual Trajectories – Modeling and Coloring

It felt nice finally getting back into modeling after so long a break. In year 1, I considered the modeling portions to be my favorite section of all we learned, so I was excited to get back in and start modeling this character.

Using the drawn pictures I made as a basis, I began work modeling up the robed figure. The actual hood itself was a lot more challenging than I expected, and I was glad to have Kelvin around to help me with modeling it correctly.

An error I can see looking back at this now however, is that I did not try to model it symmetrically from the beginning, a point I seemed to miss when Kelvin stated it, and one I would regret later down the line.

The picture above shows how the model looked after a while. With the base bones of the character body created, I got to work smoothing the model, adding the arms, legs and eventually after a lot of annoyance regarding it, redoing the upper scarf-like portion to look more how I envisioned it. Beyond that, I also gave the character a small staff on their back to add to the overall look of the model.

As you can see, I also had begun trying out some material options regarding the color palette of the model, wanting to get as close as I could to the way I had envisioned it overall. After some digging, I eventually found the Toon shader for Arnold, which had an interesting outline feature for materials that I like the look of.

So after painting up the model with shaders and materials, I eventually had this:

I’m honestly really happy with how it turned out when colored. I finally finished the modeling and coloring after a bit of trying out the rigging and animation side of the project. Because of that, you can also see that I ended up making the model symmetrical, to allow for an easier time rigging up and animating my model later on.

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Virtual Trajectories – Designing My Character

With my mood board as a basis, I began to draw up some simple ideas for what I might model my character as. While my artistic skills are incredibly lacking, I like to think I make up for it with creativity in my ideas, and was able to create a lot of different humanoids:

From there, I took the 3 most promising designs and began work on coloring them, using the ideas I learned from other color theory classes during the course to create color schemes for the character, as well as noting down different elements of the model to take into account.

Finally, as much as I’d love to model and rig all of these characters, I needed to pick one for the projects, eventually landing on the white-robed figure.