viza 613

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.

Here are the resultant characters for our first project. Granted, they are remarkably - dare I say, suspiciously - similar in appearance. Ah, but there is a very simple reason for this: they are both sheep. Yes! It is true! However, you will note the different titles…we have first of all our generic sheep, to be used en masse to form flocks.

> White Sheep

Not to be (much) confused with what will become the titular character of the piece, the Black Sheep. He’s a bit smaller and stockier than the other sheep…hopefully to add some degree of cuteness/humour to his actions. Also, he sports a clever disguise, using a sweater to blend in with the rest of the flock whilst engaging upon covert nocturnal operations. Despite all this talk of NURBS as the embodiment of evil, destroyer of time and so forth, I am still determined to tame it…thus I tried again to make these fellows with NURBS. The results are better than before, I think.

> Black Sheep

A few more NURBS and polygons complete the ensemble, some innocuous little things just lying in wait to harvest wool from sheepish victims come springtime.

> Props > Shed

And now, with EXTREME HAIRSTYLING. Plus a little cloudy some-such for skin texture which turned out nicer than I expected…and may keep in mind for the later projects. I think the nurb forms have something to do with that weird mane concentrated around his neck…something about the placement of the vertices. Or maybe I don’t know much about the fur system yet.

Having started the model, destroyed it in annoyance, and repeated the process a few times…the end result is more simple than I would have liked, but should be a pretty good starting place for the nursery rhyme characters to follow.

Another sheep for the page, hooray! Sheep lend themselves so well to the cute theme, after all, and this sucker is good practice for the flock that will show up in my nursery rhyme. Observe, if you will, the elegant form of le mouton…evoking the classic chia pet in all its Rubenesque simplicity

Still having trouble with the blog system, namely, getting it to do what I want. Like display pictures.
The model - to be used eventually with the nursery rhyme project - is fairly simple; lots of flat surfaces that lend themselves to polygons. I started with lots of primitive shapes - all cubes, I think - and extruded them or scaled them into shape. A few things, like the roof and lamp were modified by pulling and merging vertices. The fence posts were made simply through scale and duplication, although I am still having problems when trying to group them together: I still haven’t figured whether this is an oversight on my part, or Maya being stupid. A boolean operation was handy for making the doorway
Textures still baffle me, which is why only one is shown here, but hopefully I will be able to change the material of the building to something more suitable in the near future.

UPDATE: Image added.