Year's End Reflection

It's Been A Good Year

Let's Look Back

---

Junior year is notorious for being one of struggle and strife, but it can also be one of learning and exploration. From Petri to Ampich-Anne, I have had many chances to look into and develop many new, more complex skills than I had the chance to last year whilst focusing on design and animation. From the trials and tribulations of this bird to the new realm of stop-motion I have been able to learn many things about modeling, project planning, scope, team management, rigging, and much more.

---

From the very start of this year we had something to do. One project I did not post directly about was a fish. (from the concept art on the left) The goal of this project was to teach us all better modeling techniques, weight painting, and some ways to animate something. It was the springboard for all the modeling and rigging know-how I was to learn throughout the rest of the year. Only now do I truly understand how vital it was that we did this particular project at the beginning of the year.

Looking back upon this fish, I can directly see how it links to what I have been able to accomplish this year. Having to draft the fish initially taught me the advantages and necessity of having an image to go off of. I have repeated this technique with both Petri and Ampich-Anne, as seen in their respective posts Here and Here. Next, we learned vital modeling skills which I have taken to heart with every other 3D project since. We learned a little about UV texturing (probably the least developed skill of mine) and a lot about rigging (Which was then reiterated for me with, yet again, Petri). Each of these skills was learned more though trial and error than direct instruction. Nothing teaches you to plan ahead like having to redo the same steps ten times over due to a lack of forethought. Technically, I feel far more confident in modeling ad rigging than I did before. I feel familiar enough with Maya now as so that I can envision exactly how I intend to pul life out each and every pre-generated shape. (Maybe next year I should practice straying from those...)

---

A dramatic scene from this year's group project

---

Beyond those technical skills, this year has given me more vital practice in working with others. All but the stop motion project this year were my solitary ideas and solitary efforts. For me, working with those of differing skills and mindsets is a whole other ballpark of difficulty. Not to say I am introverted to the point where it hides my working: I'm not. Rather, I walk a fine line between wanting everything to go my way and wanting to sit back and watch things unfold. I generally lean towards the fist kind, however, when I have not worked with all the people involved before (and even then my trust only goes so far until I have seen them preform). I feel that this project was the most successful diplomatically for me, as I followed the mantra "If you think you can do it better than the person, you are assigning them to the wrong job". After the cooperative creative process, I was semi-burdened with the task of assigning jobs to people. Many were first picks for certain tasks like set building and model moving, but I often found it difficult to entrust some of the smaller things to others, even if it meant a mountain of extra work for myself. This is something I surely need to work on.

This industry is an industry of people, and it is nearly impossible to go into it without expecting to have to compromise and work with new people along the way. I must find and embrace my strength soon, so I can refine it and combine it with the strengths of others to make a truly skillful work. Last year was a jack of all trades, but really skillful at nothing in particular beyond concept art. That is still something I feel I excel at more than most, and I want to use the skills I have and will gain to be able to both create concepts that can be feasibly executed in these programs and to be able to execute them myself in the way I envision them.

---

Looking back at all I have done, I don't think I would honestly change anything. Every project messed up, every minute wasted, showed me countless ways that I could improve myself and my project workflow. I was not as productive as I could have been mid-year, but I learned from that, in hindsight, how I could manage my time better. If I had to change something, it would be watching more tutorials before diving into something new. Maybe, if I did that, I wouldn't have to redo as much.

All thing considered, I feel this has been my most beneficial year in e-Communication to date. I have had the rare chance to explore a field that I am interested in pursuing as a career this early in my life. To me, it's best to dip your foot into the ocean of possible careers as soon as possible, as to minimize time wasted pursuing something that you turn out to hate. Maybe that causes me to put too much pressure on my early decisions, but I suppose we'll see how that directs me in the future.

I hope to keep up my posts a little more this summer, but in the meantime, this will be my school-end farewell!

Ampich-Anne: Character Modeling

Waiting, She's Waiting,

(Waiting for the frame to render...)

---

Meet Ampich-Anne: a friendly girl with a robot body! Well, not actually. The real concept is a bodiless alien that can inhabit machinery, but that is not too important right now! What is important is my attempt to create her! After dealing with Petri for so long, I wanted to use my rigging and modeling knowledge on something new!


I knew that rigging a mechanical character would be much easier than doing another organic model, so I wanted to keep the specs of my project smaller so I could be able to rig and model it within the rest of the mostly gone school year.


On the left I have one of my pictures of my character, but I knew I couldn't keep to it very well: The webbing would have been nearly impossible to do with my skill set and time, there were a lot of extraneous bits on the legs I knew I would leave behind, and the shoulder and thigh joints were to unrealistic. (With that arrangement she wouldn't be able to lift her arms up straight, and I had no idea how to manage the drawn hip setup) So, I went to work simplifying the design and making it smoother. Given that I drew her a little different each time, I didn't have many qualms changing the little indiscreet details for the sake of this model.

When I started, my major alterations were to the upper arms and thighs (I added a luminescent glass texture to them) and a small skirt-shaped piece that concealed the rough end of the segmented torso. I was very proud of how the body and face and hands came out, I took many, many, gratuitous screenshots of it. There was one GLARING problem, however (and no, it was not the eyes): the shoulders (again). You see, I didn't notice the problem I had mentioned earlier regarding the arm mobility until the point when I tried to move the arms. I ended up having to redo them completely and replaced the shoulder shown above with a more doughnut-shaped one.

At this point perhaps you may be wondering why I'm showing you all of this. Is it just a model? Am I going to animate it? Am I just showing off? The answer to all of these is "maybe, we'll see". but in all honesty, this project is a kind of final thesis for me, I think. It has taken all the small lessons I learned about Maya and combined them to make this (relatively) usable character. While I have not animated it, I certainly have posed it. I think My main goal with this character was honestly light practice and modeling (both in the creating and posing sense) practice. Below are a few examples of lighting (left) and posing (right) experimentation.

Coincidentally, I worked on this project around the same time that my teacher assigned us the topic of "time". Being in animation, it should be exceedingly easy to display time in a non-alarm-clock fashion. I, however, wanted to try to show time in a still image. I wanted to show her waiting. Not being in an organic body, She could feasibly wait in one area for extremely long periods of time. My idea was to take two identical images with differing textures and fuse them into each other as if they were a before and after statement.

Here is the result! I made it go from a more lush field to a sandy wasteland, signaling a deterioration of the climate, or maybe just a season change. I have her looking to the right as if she is looking towards the future, longing. If I were to fix it, I know I would increase the shadow resolution (to avoid that blocky-ness) and maybe make the grass and sand fade into each other more instead of just harshly dividing at Ampich-Anne. It contrasts a bit too much with the gradient sky.

But anyway, I thank anyone who has been sticking around and checking on my work over the last few years, heres my final, desired result of my shiny texture rendering. I hope you enjoy the intricate reactions as much as I do!

Petri Swallow: Revamped

The Bird Is Back

For the last time, however.

---

Remember Petri? That yellow bird that gave me so much grief last semester? Well, I revived him! (Mostly by popular demand of my peers, however.) I wanted to make something out of him to prove that I had not spent an entire semester working in vain. (Which it really did feel like I kind of did, in a way.) 

So, I buckled down and made my quasi-rigged bird move for the audience of expectant friends and parents. And, looking at it now, it wasn't as bad as anticipated. Surely not as good I wanted, but ok.

Here it is:

Now, I know it's short and the rigging is not smooth and he never does get his drink, but I think this particular animation is a testament to this past year of animation and my growth in dealing with some particularly horrid issues and incomprehensibly frustrating challenges along the way!

JCCC Technology Challenge

Two Hours of Work, 

Four Seconds of Animation

---

Hey there! 

It's been a while, I know. And it's been a while since I participated in the event I'm going to talk about, but now is better than never, isn't it? Anyway, let's get right down to it!

A few months back, I had the chance to participate in the Johnson County Community College Technology Challenge as an animator! I was admittedly quite nervous about it, since I had never participated before, and had no clue as to the criteria of the competition. I was very scared that I was going to be out of my league going, but I went nevertheless.

And oh am I glad that I did.

Until that point, I had been relatively unaware that JCCC had an animation program, let alone a rather good one. Kansas, sadly, is not a typical place you'd expect to find good areas to study in that field (But then again, here I am learning this in high school). But despite that assumption I found myself in a beautifully equipped classroom with PCs (I love them, but I hadn't learned to animate on them), tablets, and a second mac monitor. It felt like home, and the teachers that worked there were nice and very helpful, to boot.

The challenge? It was far easier than my fears of character rigging, animating a rock concert, or even having to collaboratively work on it with the people I arrived with, none of whom I knew particularly well. What was it? A logo. 

The JCCC Logo, to be precise. Our job was relatively straightforward: create and animate the JCCC Logo in Maya and create a brief animation displaying it.

This is the logo

We had two hours, and I managed to squeak out four seconds of relatively solid animation from that! (Boy, does modeling suck up time) Here are those precious four seconds:

I placed second overall for the animation category! I feel that if I had been a little less finicky with the text, and had been able to make it more straight, I could have maybe pushed into first place. But, alas, I did not. But at least I lost to a fellow e-Comm classmate!

Tutorial Time

Managing Maya

Forging Feet Fast

---

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!

---

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.

---

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!

E.T. - Extra Technological

THE HOME STRETCH:

Robot Meets Life Meets Cumulative Final Project

---

Meet Robo: A rising star in the student movie clip industry. While he may not appear to be much, it was our task to give him his premier debut.

Well, maybe that wasn't exactly the outline of the project, but it's pretty close. Our real assignment was to apply all that we have learned into a group project. These new skills we aimed to apply were skills like 3D modeling, lighting, using a green screen, and special effects. My team: Jessica Love, Jessie Blom, and myself. With our combined powers, we got down to business.

To start off, we dove into the essence of the plot: the storyboard. Since storyboarding is something I particularly like to do, I took charge and scribbled our cheesy ideas down. (Now, I know my art can be better than this, but we didn't want to spend so much time on this) We came up with the idea of parodying that one scene from E.T., but with a robot on another planet. Robots: what could possibly go wrong? (Maya, that's what, but more about that later)

We went though a few hardcore rounds of 'nose-goes' and Jessica came out as our actor. So, while my comrades trekked down to the green screen studio, I stayed behind as our resident "Maya Master". For those unfamiliar, Autodesk Maya is a  3D modeling program, and the one we happened to have in the classroom. It's not a bad program, but it does have it's quirks. Some of those quirks, I've found, can be rather, or more accurately, extremely frustrating. But we'll get to that story.

Looks OK now, but...

I had an absolute blast modeling our resident star in Maya. Being a robot, he was easily composed of inorganic shapes which are much easier to make in maya than say, a hand. The special touch I added this time was parenting. 

Parenting, beyond the maternal and paternal varieties, is the act of taking one shape, and sticking it to another shape. This means that, if I move the parent shape, all child shapes below it will move, but not any shapes that the parent is parented. it's like a big tree, branches of children extending from the one, mighty parent at the bottom. If that shape moves, all the rest follow. This was crucial to having our robot move since who would want a robot whose elbow didn't move with it's shoulder? or its torso? No one, that's who. I put my heart and soul into perfecting our co-star.

Look at this absolute mess

The final trial on the modeling before animation was the wrists. (You can see they don't move in the final product) 

This was a rather blunt showcase of one of maya's specialties: Screwing up the simple stuff. I mean, just look at what it did to poor Pasted_cylinder_RWrist. 

Complete disaster. 

But, nevertheless, I persevered and came out with our amazing robot: Robo. A few shiny textures later and we were on the fast track.

ROBO in his completed glory

On the flip side of our team, we'd gathered our green screen shots together to key them out. By 'key out', I mean remove that bright green color from the background and replace with with something cool.

After compiling our efforts, we added the nifty sounds of Celldweller's The Wings of Icarus and Viola, we had our project. (It's a cool track, I'd listen to the whole thing if the clip interests you, it's interesting music for sure)

This project, overall, has taught me some of the more in depth abilities of Maya. I learned how to apply my knowledge of shapes, Booleans, parenting, and even aligning to make the robot reach it's highest degree of excellence. Outside of my new-found technical prowess, We, as a team, also gained more experience in team synergy and division of labor. (This is something I need more practice in for sure)

For future projects, I feel that I'd like to keep with the group dynamic we had for this one, but with more communication. I felt it may have been smart to check each other more often so that we are all and the same track. I also feel that, as we all improve in our chosen tracks, that we'll find even more smooth and easy teamwork styles to use. I await being able to work with the people I have seen in the future. And without further ado: our project:

My Newfound Maya Toolset

I know you've seen some of my 3D creations on here,

But have any of you been wondering how it works?

---

Autodesk Maya is a 3D animation program that is almost like a beefed up shiny kind of Google Sketchup, though it may almost be degrading to Maya to compare the two. Where Sketchup let you create things in a world of rather pointy polygons and an array of built in textures, Maya can take it to the next level: creating smooth shapes and  3D textures that would put many parts of Sketchup to shame. But then again, sketchup isn't an animation program as much as a technical modeling one, so that's where the comparisons stop.

Lets take a look at some of the basic tools Maya has to offer, shall we?

---

Lessons From a Cup

One of the more interesting tools I got to discover in Maya was the revolve tool. The revolve takes a curve, and rotates it around the axis to create a full 3D object made from that curve.

The curve, however is a whole other tool on it's own. The curve tool in Maya is similar to the Pen tool in Illustrator or Photoshop. just in 3D. It consists of vectors and vertices that I can edit before or after I create the object. You can see these curves off to the left. (The fist one revolved to create the glass, the other the vase). 

When revolved, however, these curves make a NURBS surface instead of a polygon one. NURBS are created with curves and bends rather than flat polygons, and therefore had to be transformed into polygons in order to texture them as they appear below.

Using a light scorch called the Mental ray, I was able to achieve the reflective glass surface you see on the cup below. It took quite a bit of tweaking to get it to look just right.

---

The Lofty Saltshaker

Now, when I say loft, I don't mean like a lofty height or a place to live,. What I'm referring to is the Loft tool. The loft tool's power is to lay a surface over a set of curves like a tent tarp or table cloth. As you can see in the saltshakers to the left and below, the shape it forms is not a natural one, but rather several deformed circles on top of each other (descending in size) lofted to make a surface. These circles were composed of the previously mentioned NURBS curves I talked about in the cups section.

A Dramatic Angle of the shiny Saltshaker

It took some tweaking,

 but I was able to duplicate 

the shape and put salt and a 

cap on the saltshaker to 

get the result seen here.

---

The Shiniest Shape

Now, this shape here may seem to be complex and unusual, but that's not what I'm going to talk to you about right now. For now, I will talk to you about how it is lit.

In maya, there are several types of lights available to light your scene with, and they all have different uses. A few I will show you are the spotlight, directional, area, and point lights.

The light you can see on the left here is an example of how the directional light appears in maya. A directional light is a light scorch that comes from everywhere, but all pointing in the same direction. it is a lot like how the sun lights our front lawns, coming in a solid sheet of light form the sky hitting the ground. This is slightly similar to an area light. An area light lights an internal area from no discernible source. I have not yet used one, so I have no pictorial examples of it.

The spotlight is the most obviously named light in the set. It acts as a spotlight or flashlight in all aspects, shining down from a cone to light a specific area. The Point light, on the other hand, is more like a light bulb, radiating light out from a single point, as its name suggests.                                                

---

Hammer Time

For a simple tool the hammer is not a simple shape. To get this specific shape to work, I had to take the faces of a rectangular prism and cut them in half in the back (using the cut face tool) and extrude them outwards to create the back wedge.

Extruding brings a face outwards from it's origin, allowing me to extend the front of the hammer face outward. To get the rounded octagon shape of the hammer face, I used the bevel tool to cut off the edges and create new, rounded faces out of them.

---

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Infinite Loops

Ice cream: fun to eat, a little less fun to model. (Not saying it isn't fun, just a tad less so) Creating ice-cream at first seems as simple as making a circle and a cone and putting them together but it's not that easy. No ice-cream scoop is a perfectly smooth sphere, so we had to compensate for reality. To do this we used bump maps, an effects that allows us to texture a surface without editing each point manually.

The slightly pre-deformed ice cream shapes

The Same Bowl with Bump Maps attached.

The final Animation ^

---

A Slightly Simple Animation

A reoccurring project we've been working on is creating a bouncing animation with various balls. This time, we did it in Maya.

To create this animation we took videos of the various balls dropping to measure out the heights in the nifty graph editor you can see here to the left, which represents the various ranges of motion the object selected can go through, which is especially nice for visual people.

Then we took note of the frame number that the objects would hit the ground at, and marked them in the timeline you can see in the right image in the bottom bar. Keyframes are a marker in an animation timeline that defines an object to be in a certain place or position at that time. The program's job is to fill in the in-between frames. I especially like these kinds of programs since they can save you the time of drawing every frame, though sometimes I still feel that drawing frame by frame can be easier for some things. The finished animation is below, and you can see our tennis ball was rather deflated at the time of shooting, and doesn't have as much altitude as you might expect form one.

Castle Building

 Recently, I have been given the privilege to work in Autodesk Maya (A program made by a company who also released my favorite drawing program) and dive into 3D animation! For the first task we undertook, a castle was our goal. Using primarily rectangular prisms, cylinders, and a few planes, we were able to construct our basic castle structure.

The stairs that accompanied it were made of a simple rectangular prism with parts dragged up.



The extrude tool was our new friend for this project, and allowed us to drag up the blocky chunks of wall on the side without warping the whole wall in a similar manner to the hills.

The door was actually one of the hardest parts to put together. Using a thin cylinder and rectangular prism, we fused them together using the Booleans. Using it once for combining the two into a door shape, and a second time to use that shape to cut the respective shape out of the wall. I used a duplicate of the cookie-cutter shape to make the wooden door.

Plain old shapes don't add much life to an image, so with the aid of tiled images and pre made Maya textures, I placed stone and sand images all over the image. The bumps just added extra shadows.


Polygons are a concept in 3D animation that let me create the hills. As you can see to the side, the smaller squares have been warped together to create the hilly surface the castle sits on. With a soft select that influences all faces around it (The opposite of the extras function) I slowly dragged up small parts of it careful to not make the hills too blocky or unnatural. The final touch was the water



The small pond was actually quite simple, as you can see it's only one plane. I gave it a water texture, lowered the opacity, and set it in a low area of the ground. And viola, we had a simple pond.

This castle demonstrated many basics of animation, and I have found Maya less and less intimidating as I go on.