Here is the exercise demonstrating weight.
…I might have gotten a little carried away. In retrospect, I wish I’d included this gag in the story for the final animation. But on its own, it makes a decent retaliation against all the frustration this sheep put me through this semester! Muahahaa!
(They look a little like rocks…But they’re definitely bags of wool. So, he’ll be okay. Probably.)
Oy.
(In this case, meant to convey the sheer tiredness of the moment, whilst demonstrating how very glad I am to have this finished, and being fairly satisfied with the way it all turned out - despite a few lingering annoyances with my own Maya-limitations keeping several things from looking just the way I’d wanted. Methinks I need to do a little studying over Christmas break.)
That is all.
(Also, musical number is from incompetech.com)
EDIT: Really, there is such a thing as too much shed. And that’s clear from the first video where the shed takes up ridiculous amounts of screentime. And I wanted to redo the shed texture, anyway. Thus, here is a different version of the shed. I do still like the yellow from the previous version, so will probably try to combine the two.
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The style here reminds me of something…probably a long-repressed memory of claymation theatre or some such thing from childhood…but I can’t think what. Anyway, the texturing-mostly for the sheep- still needs a bit more work to make the UV mapping line up correctly. And the wool/sweater textures may be way too subtle at the moment. But I’m fairly pleased with how the inanimate objects turned out..especially the sack and the doors. Also, I think I will change the texture of the shed at some point…it looks like a stucco brick at the moment, which doesn’t really make much sense.
(Photo/textures, when used, are from cgtextures.com…a really good resource site)
A newer version of Project 2…this time using a rigged sheep. Still needs tweaking where skin weights are concerned of course, but it works better than the hierarchy method.
…needs work. ‘Nuff said. I’d hoped to use a rigged character for this, and do have a full rig (although, without proper skinning), but in the end went back to hierarchy & keyframing. I plan to fix LOTS of things in this after today.
i.e. a simple walk cycle. Much thanks to the people who made the pre-rigged characters.
Once I finally got the feet to stop floating, the rest of the alterations and tweaks went much smoother. There’s still something ‘off’ about the hip movement, I think, but overall it seems to work. I have yet to try the reverse-foot kinematics shown in class; I expect these would be more convincing.
<two movies: the whole character and a slight close-up >
(Click on the pics)
Er…I think it counts as a pendulum, although the force happens sideways.
I took the previous animation exercise and turned him into one of those cheesy ‘drinking bird’ novelties you see sometimes…although the weight is more unbalanced here than in the real toy, it still seems to tip pretty convincingly.
This part of the exercise was done last, after I understood how to make the graph editor do what I wanted…and it’s a good thing I saved it ’till the end, as it was much trickier to tweak the easing and timing on the bobbing motion to make it look like the weight was actually shifting and balancing itself. It isn’t perfect, but I think it works well.
(Click on the pic)
The first video with just one ball bouncing is pretty rough; learning how to use the graph editor before moving on to the other scenes. There is some very slight squashing and stretching, but it may be hard to see. The graph editor was mostly used for moving keyframes and adjusting timing here.
With the second ball, I played more with the curve handles and finer adjustments/easing for the bounce motion, but didn’t do the squash/stretch here.
The third ball incorporated squash/stretch (possibly a bit exaggerated) and learning how to break and weight tangents in the graph editor…really giving a much better control over the motion and making keyframing seem much less painful than I’d expected. Hurrah for the graph editor!
(In retrospect, the shadows might be a bit distracting, though. So much for trying to be fancy.)
(Click on the pics)
Now that the site is behaving again and allowing me to actually log in…I can finally make a new post here, to show the previous project. *shakes fist at blog*
This little abomination of nature was made with a few extruded spheres and cylinders…the leg is in three parts, and parented from the foot upwards. I did try parenting from the opposite direction (body downwards) but couldn’t quite get the movement I wanted. As it is, the initial jumps work pretty well with the simple keyframe/rotate approach but the curves are still pretty wonky. Looks like he’s floating or something at the top of a couple jumps, especially that big one at the end.
(Click the Pic)
…which looks very, very much like the previous NURBS version, save a few extra vertices in the face.
Nevertheless, it has been converted to subdivisions.
