Ampich-Anne: Character Modeling

Waiting, She's Waiting,

(Waiting for the frame to render...)

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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!

Good Golly, Gummies!

STOP!

In the name of stop motion!

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Do you know what stop motion is? It's very likely that you have witnessed it whether you know it or not! Films such as The Boxtrolls, Coroline, and The Nightmare Before Christmas are all stop motion productions! What this means is that most if not all of what you are seeing consists of actual, tangible, 3-dimensional models that are moved minutely, frame-by-frame and taken pictures of to create a moving feature film.

It's real, and it's very, very tedious. But it is yet a passion of a small sect of the animation community. This semester our project was to incorporate stop motion into our projects! It was a group project, something I had not done since last year's E.T. clip, but I was surrounded by people I knew and somewhat trusted, and I was confident we could get something together.

The hardest part always seems to be coming to a consensus on the direction of the short. We had ideas involving clothes, living models, and most favorably, candy. The prevailing idea was a short story taking place in a kind of candy land with the stars being gummy bear villagers and a ferocious Bionicle beast. It was not meant to be long, but in hindsight we could have pulled off a longer fight scene to our benefit. After carefully crafting our edible utopia, we set the stage and delegated jobs. Sierra Draney was our intrepid photographer, Jake Combs our monster animating connoisseur, Katelyn Brule our music selector and co-set creator with Sierra and Anna Gaiche, and yours truly as the gummy moving master.

And the best part? This was our winning(ish) entry for eMagine this year! My team and I placed second for animated story!

I hope you enjoy watching it as much as my friends enjoyed eating it!

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!

JCCC Technology Challenge

Two Hours of Work, 

Four Seconds of Animation

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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!

Let's Look At:

Drawing Practice

Animation-Centered Exercices

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Yesterday I was browsing some articles on Animationarena.com, and I came across something I felt the need to share with you all!

Click on the image to visit the article

In Annie Gray's Article, she covered a multitude of exercises that will train the artist to draw with animation, emotion, and dynamics in mind. Gray emphasizes the importance of seeing the details that you don't see normally. Animators need to be able to draw the small details of objects that the human mind disregards in favor of pattern and shape recognition. For example: the human face is a very detailed, complex object. It has wrinkles, creases, flyaway hairs, eyelashes, and all sorts of traits. However, people don't need all this information to understand what they see is a face.

:)

See, you can register that as a smiling face, can't you? It doesn't have eyelashes, a chin, or even a nose. But our mind knows it to be a face anyway. It's this same effect that gray defines as an issue. if you don't take the time to notice all the details, you won't be able to draw them.

I highly recommend taking a look at this article and trying out its exercises if this is a field you want to go in.

But back to my review!

I've seen some of the exercises they recommend before, and tried out one of them myself today: cafe drawing. Sitting in a classroom I observed my fellow classmates as they tested, and picked out certain people to quickly sketch before they shifted poses. Here are some of the sketches:

It was a lot harder than I expected to get a sketch down before the person moved (And to not look like I'm staring)

But just from doing that much I realized the benefits to doing as the article suggests. If you don't practice these skills of detail and movement-oriented art, you won't get good at them.

Gray clearly has a lot of experience refining and developing these kinds of skills, and the article is very well written (even if it is challenging to follow the exercises). I'm sure that I will be using these in the future, will you?

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!