Petri Swallow: Revamped

The Bird Is Back

For the last time, however.

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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!

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!

E.T. - Extra Technological

THE HOME STRETCH:

Robot Meets Life Meets Cumulative Final Project

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.                                                

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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.

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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 ^

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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.