Tutorial Time

Managing Maya

Forging Feet Fast

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Today I am going to impart some of my acquired Maya knowledge with you all! While making my bird petri I found a quick and easy way to make 3D, simple feet that could be adapted for use in birds, reptiles, frogs, or anything in particular!

First off, make the leg. Or the cylinder, if you just want to practice the foot process.

Selecting the bottom faces, extrude the bottom down to the height you want your foot to be. Take the faces you want to be your toes (I removed ended in the middle of the faces to make larger toes) and extrude them all at once. You'll want to make sure 'Keep Faces Together' is deactivated and the you include as many subdivisions as you feel you need. I suggest 6 or more for longer toes.

When you have extended the toes, use the scale tool to shorten the end faces of the toes together BEFORE you exit out of the extrude tool. If you can use the tool to lower the toes to be flat with the ground, great!

However, Maya doesn't always play nice.

If you find that moving up and down sends your toes going in different directions, then here is my quick fix to help you out:

First, select the vertices of the bottom of each toe (together), but not the vertices connecting the toes to the leg (as shown at right).

Going into a side view that works best for you, use the scale tool (Scale Y) to compress all the vertices into a straight line.

After you do that, you can use the move tool and pull them all down to be level with the flat of the foot (or whatever you want them to be level with, if you are going for something different).

As you can see below, it is easy to eyeball it if you zoom in close.

Now, if you go into smooth preview (by selecting the mesh and hitting the "3" key), you can see what you have made! In some animals, there is a toe in the back. To make this toes you just repeat the previous process with the face directly in the back of the front toes. I did this with my foot, as you can see on the right.

Now, the bottom of your foot may still be circular, rectangular, or whatever shape you used. This can be an easy fix!

Taking the opposing vertices along the bottom, just use the scale tool to draw them in together. (In some cases, using soft select in this part will help render a better result in merging into the ankle).

Finally, just tweak the widths of the toes at the beginning, middle and end until you have the kind of toes you are looking for! I only tapered the ends of my toes for this example, but there is so much more you can do!

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Thank you so much for taking the time to read or try this tutorial. Being my first attempt at making one, commentary is appreciated! Let me know what I could do better, or what I'm already doing well!

May The Feet Be With You

Petri Swallow: Large Project Turned Learning Experience

So what happens when you underestimate a project?

You learn. Fast.

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Say hello to Pertri: a small bird with a big problem. We'll get to that problem later. For now, allow me to introduce you officially to the project I have been working on for the past semester. Now, what I expected Petri to become was is far removed from what he ended up being (not to mention that they went though several gender changes and arguments before I finally gave in to calling Petri a 'he' like everyone else did). Here is an overview of what I had expected at the start of the semester:

It started from a simple sketch, a small bird with a broom cleaning alligator's teeth like a dentist-janitor combo. I, having designed the bird to be more or less simple and round, chose Petri to be the star of my first semester animation project.

Little did I know how much work that would turn out to be.

The story went as so: 

Petri flies into work one day to attend to a large clint with a larger problem: there's one tooth that just won't get clean.

Petri tries and tries to clean it, using all sorts of unorthodox methods, but no matter what he does, nothing helps. In the end, in frustration, he ends up accidentally breaking the tooth, bringing about his untimely demise at the hands, er-mouth, of the gator.

I had a storyboard, but the pencil marks were to light and smudged to scan and show you.

So, to the real problem:

Oh wait, not that problem.

This problem:

(You can tell it's the real problem because I made it larger)

This is what happens when you don't construct your rig quite right

The name of this problem? Rigging. For those of you who don't know or are unfamiliar with rigging: rigging is the placement of bones in an animated character to make animation easier and to define character movement. In essence, constructing their skeleton, as you can see above. 

Now you may be thinking: "But Greta, that looks like a fine and dandy skillet rig you've got going there, what's the problem?" But my friend, I must tell you this is the finished, refined rig of the bird. While it doesn't look much different from the initial setup, it is far better at what is was built to do that version 1.0. 

To get to this stage of superior rigging, I went through modeling, rigging, assigning bones to joints, beginning animation, and then undoing all my work until I was back at square two: rigging. Because of this, I have no true finished "animation", but the amount I have learned from the project makes all the struggle and turmoil and headaches worth it. For example: The prop and scenery work shown below from what I had anticipated to be part of the final work.

The most valuable skill I gained from this is the proper, or at least more efficient, way to rig a character in Maya. IK rigging is a kind of rigging shortcut that takes where you want a certain joint to be, and moves all subsequent joints in a way that will get it there. It takes longer to set up, but makes the actual animating a whole world easier.

So, in summary, will I be putting forth more effort to get something done right next semester?

Yup. I want to be able to get something completed this time.

Will I grossly underestimate the scope of a project?

I hope not. I need to take careful consideration of what difficulties the next project will have.

Will I be using IK rigging the first time?

Oh yes. It's a very handy tool and I hope to perfect my work on it.

Will you all be seeing more of me and my work next year?

You bet! I want to be more active on this blog, so I may also post some non-animation art ventures to keep this place a tad more lively!

Remember, if you have anything to say leave it in the comments! I like to get feedback and hear what you all think!

Acting in Animation

Acting? What does that have to do with Animation?

More than you'd expect, it seems

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Today I took a look at Doron A. Meir's article on acting and animation. While the title intrigued me, the content did more so. In his article, Meir covers what it really means to bring a character to life in animation. He doesn't just mean the story or even the design, but the movement of a character in itself, whether you were the one directing the story or just working off a given script, Meir stresses the importance of acting.

Meir claims that modern animations have come to lack the higher quality of acting in their animation as seen in older works. He sees the characters as well modeled, but poorly developed and poorly acted. He sees the character move, but he can no longer feel them working as an individual character. Meir's definition of acting requires that the animator can think, feel, react, and retain the consistency of the character in a way that makes the audience believe that the character is a real, living, breathing (where applicable), thinking individual: a practice that is much harder than you may think.

While Meir may have a good point, they provide little to no evidence to support their claims on neither the loss of acting nor any way to bring it back to the spotlight. Meir gives us no clear examples of a poorly acted and well-acted character in any more detail than a name. This, unfortunately, detracts from their interesting argument a little, giving us no more than some textbook terms on how to feel, react, and set the mood.

Despite the detraction from his validity, Meir does bring up an interesting point, whether or not this is becoming less prevalent: how to do more than make a character move. What Meir misses in the things he sees are the extra thoughts and effort to truly develop a character. Sometimes I can see what he means by it, too. I need to be sure to, with my own characters, bring to life their personalities and make them empathize-able on-screen to the viewers.

See the article yourself at:

http://www.animationarena.com/acting-and-animation.html

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