Character and Narrative: Final Animation

Are final animation involves a spider thats wants an apple that has fallen off of a tree but who is scared about the hight that it has to jump to get the apple, but an inch worm comes along and shows the spider that the hight is not that intimidating so it jumps off. the spider then builds up confidence and jumps too, there both at the bottom with the apple and the inch worm gives the spider a thumbs up, suddenly another apple falls off the tree and crushes the inchworm. The spider is horrified and flings back up to the tree using its web.

I find the animation to be comedic, which pleases me because I know that we've achieved what we wanted are animation to be like. The things that I like about the animation are that the sounds add about 40 percent of the comedy and the best sounds are the squishy ones, another thing I like about our animation are the characters because we were able to make them dumb looking and we were able to rig the characters so that we could make them squishy as well which is great.

However, the things that I don't like about are animation is that some of the sounds have a high pitch tone going through it, which annoyed me when editing the animation in premier. I'm also not a big fan of when the eyes close in first person view because the eyes on the spider aren't in two rows of three on either side, there two big eyes and then one small eye to the side of the big eye and another small eye underneath the big eye. It just bugs me that it doesn't match up right.

The one thing that I would change though is that the spider character can't move its mouth because something when wrong whilst creating the character. to change this I would go back and try to figure out how I could make the mouth move, I think I'd have to unbind the mesh from the rig so that I could get the mouth to move which is a bit of a pain to do. But all in all I'm proud of are animation Oscar and I have made.    

Evaluation

 My progress through this module has had me at different levels of emotion because it’s something I haven’t done before but it’s also something that I’d like to carry on doing in the future. 3D animation is one of the fields of animation I would like to go in to in the future, so this module has taught me quite a bit in what goes on in making a 3D animation from scratch. This module had also taught me how to communicate between someone because of working with a partner I had to exchange ideas and opinions for the animation we created.

 In the module I had to create a character that was similar to our tutors so that we could get use to the 3D program called Maya. 3D animation being one of the things I’d like to go in to I already knew a few things about Maya, but that didn’t meant that I didn’t make any mistakes whilst working in Maya. I got give some tutorial videos for the demo character I had to create but before I watched the section about modeling I thought I could do it without any help because I modeled a character last year, I was so wrong! I got about half way through and messed up so I had to delete everything and start again and this time I watched the videos I got given. Watching the videos helped a lot and I seemed to get through the modeling stage quite quick, and I didn’t seem to have any complications along the way. This put me in a good mood but the hard part hadn’t even started yet. The hard part was rigging the demo character because this is where I learnt a lot about Maya and how easy it is to mess up and not understand why I’ve messed up. Once I’d got the hang of rigging though it was okay, but one problem it did have was when I was putting IK handles in the legs I wasn’t paying attention and put in the wrong IKs. I feel like I’ve come a long way in Maya now compared to last year because through out this module I’ve been on Maya nearly every day and I’ve leant how to do a lot of things twice because I created another model for the second part of this module.

The main bit of the module was creating a one-minute 3D animation with a partner. Working with Oscar was fun because we are both comedy people and that was the main theme in are animation, however it did take us a long time to think of a good idea for are animation. In my opinion I think that we had a good work ethic and good time management because I created one character, he created the other one, both of which having the same amount of work to do on them. Are time management went well because we modeled our characters in about two weeks, which left us with a week of animating, a week of rendering and a week of post production. In the animation I animated most of my character which the complicated movements like the walk cycle (my characters a spider so that means eight legs the animate), but because my character it in the animation more than Oscars character (he created an Inch Worm) he wanted to animate my spider as well so that the work load is even. During the animation stage I found it entertaining because Maya would do most of the work for my, it was just a matter of posing my character in its key frames and letting Maya do the in-between frames with a bit of tweaking if it didn’t look right. I feel like one of the hardest part of the whole thing was actually texturing me spider character, not because I didn’t know how to but because I didn’t know what my character was going to look like. It took me at least tree weeks just to think of a texture for the character, and it didn’t help that Oscar knew what he was doing because it made me feel like I was going wrong somewhere. I finally figured out the spiders texture and I’m happy about it because it fits the style of are animation, which is in the style of being blocky.

Over all through out this module I feel like I’ve achieved some new skills in Maya and also in communicating with other people and getting confidence in my own work. Doing the demo character helped a lot because it helped sink in the information I needed to create my own model and I will be keeping the tutorial videos for later on if I want to do any future animations in Maya. There is one thing about my character I’d like to change, which is that the spiders’ mouth does not move. I initially made the spider with a working mouth that opened and closed, but I had a problem with my model so I gave it to Matt (our tutor) to have a look at it and he fixed most of it, but when I got it back I couldn’t manipulate the mouth at all. Knowing this I still carried on animating with the spider and I was going to fix the problem later but I never got round to it and plus I forgot. However the animation Oscar and I have created in my opinion is comedic and visually pleasing, I also like the smooth/squishy movements in the inchworm because it adds character to the model and helps the comedy side of the animation. I mainly did the sounds in the animation and Oscar tweaked it up at the end, because he is better at post production than I am but I feel like the sounds add another level of comedy especially the squishy noises because there are multiple sounds layered on top of each other.        

   

Character and Narrative: 3D Environment

For most films and TV shows the producers use made up environments so that they can save on money not going out to multiple destinations around the world, they create the environments using green sceens and 3D softwares onthe computer. CGI can create wonderful things like new worlds, alien like plants, and architecture that doesn't even exist in the surroundings. A good examlpe of this is in the TV serise Game of Thrones:

 

















It seems like more detail can be placed into 3D environments then it can in 2D anination because in 3D you have more to work with and more oppotunity to do so. However, more detail will mean longer per production time so its not always a good thing to have a grewat deal of detail in scenes which don't really need it. 3D animation open up more jobs for aniomators because you need multiple people working toether on the same thing so that they can make it to their best abilities and so that they get different feedback from each other. It also opens jobs for people how do lighting and specialise in compositing videos togerther.

Character and Narractive: Producing a 3D animation

In 3D animation there are more things to do than there is to do in 2D animation, such as when you create a character in 3D you then have to model the character, then rig it, then make controllerst for it so that you can then move it later, and then animated it. Where as in 2D you jsy draw a character and then you will be able to animated the character straight after. Also in 3D animation you have to think about what the character is doing so that you can rig it correctly, because if you don't you fill find your character going through things like when they put there hand down on a table, the hand might go through it. Texturing a 3D character is harder to do as well because you have to have to unfold the skin of the character so that it turns 2D and then add texture to that in photoshop. but you'll have to think about texturing the unfolded skin because it will look a bit deformed. Not many people can make a 3D character becauase you need to develope the skill for it and forsome that has taken many years, but for others they just hire someone else to do it for them.   

Character and Narrative: 3D Itself

There are many different ways of showing 3D animaton to the world wether it's in an amusemant park or a cinema or even just in the high street. It is great how we as a society can make unreal things come to life but yet we kind of take it all for granted because we'll just walk on by it or just ignor it all together.

3D animation is probable the best in the cinemars because we can now watch films in 3D so you feel a part of the story when things from the film comes out at you.

4D cinemas allows the audeince to experience a new level of watching films, because in a 4D cinema there are devices in the room which projects multiple things into the center of the room so that it looks like things from the film are coming out at you. Ther also blow air at your feet if that film is trying to create the feeling of little things crawling on your feet, or shoot you with water if someone or something sneazes on screen.   

Other ways of of showing 3D animations are amusement parks because they can show your what the rides are going to be like before you even get on them, or they can put you in a room and then using the power of 3D animation it can make you feel like you're in another world or in a different environment.

Character and Narrative: 3D animation/Motion capture

3D animation has its ups and downs in the world, 3D animation can brind a lot of help not just in films but in other companies too like architecture because it helps them visualise there buildings in a 3D environment. Its very popular in video games because in are modern society we are wanting every thing to look more life like so that inhances the experience of the game. This also helps video games feel more like a film because it has more detail in it. To get the realism effect video game developers use motion capture suites and facioal capture to get the realism in the games, so what they do is get real people to act out what the characters are doing in the story but have them wear little dots everywhere so that the cameras thay are scattered around the room they're in can capture every movement they make. A good example of this are in a games such as Call of Duty: Advance Warfare, The Last of Us and Unchanted.

In films 3D animation has come a long way because we can now create a full feature length film just using the computers but we can make it look so fantastically realistic we'll forget it's not real. Such films as 'Avitar' and 'Rise of The Planet of The Apes' use motion capture as well to create this effect. It's amazing how realistic things can look in a film which is obviously not real, this makes us the view believe in things that aren't real but helps the story no matter what.

  

Character and Narrative: Making the Sound

For the animation I decided to get a load of sound effects from youtube so I can use them for things such as wind, environmental sounds, squishy noises, screams, dramatic sounds, etc. I tried to find sounds that where comedic but also fit in with our animation, so this was hard but also fun at the same time because it was just me listening to a load of funny noises for a long time. I found quite a load so that Oscar and I can go through them together to pick out the best ones.

After we sorted that out, we then rented out the sound booth at college and started making the character noises. The character sounds are just Oscar and mines voices mumbling and not really talking English. This was because we didn't want any actual dialect or words in the animation. Making the sounds took us a full morning to do because we had to plan what sounds were needed where and also us thinking about what the sounds we make were like. We had a bit of a problem about a scream sound because none of us could do a scream that actually fitted the animation so we're going to find one on the internet instead. All in all I think the sounds we made were good and comedic, we had a lot of fun in the sound booth so hopefully that will project well in the animation as well.

Putting the sounds into the animation was my job to do because Oscar did most of the putting together of the animation. To be honest adding sound is one of me favourite things to do because there as so many different ways you can change a situation just by using sound, so it's interesting to see how other people use different sound for the same situation.

 I put the sound and the animation together using Adobe Premier Pro and with this it was easy for me to tell which sounds were needed for which scene. Putting the sound together wasn't that hard to do but it did take me some time to do because of the amount of sounds I had to go through and edit so that it would fit into the animation.

There are some sounds that I've picked out in the animation that make something seem more vile than what it should be, like when the inch worm gets squished, I've put in loads of horrible squishy sounds to make it sound great. I feel like the sounds we've made and picked work well with the animation and hopefully add more comedic effect to it, and there is obviously some famous sounds in there from films which people will recognise.    

Character and Narrative: Post Production Part 3

 There is parts in the animation where the camera is above the characters and for me to do this I had to remove the top of the tree. Doing this takes away the shadows on the branch and characters, so to solve this problem I had to fix it in post production by duplicating the scene layer in After Effects and then creating a mask where the shadow would be and then just manipulating the colour in the mask to make it look like a shadow and then just feathering out the edges which makes the shadow look believable.

For the last scene I wanted to add a motion blur to the spider when it flings back up to the tree. I was finding it hard to do because I couldn't get it to work because I was being dumb. I got Oscar to help me and he told me to turn on frame blending on the time line and it worked so now the spider is blurry.

Character and Narrative: Rendering

I had a few problems with rendering everything out, it was either due to the computers at college being really slow so I had to stop the rendering and start it agin at home on my laptop over night, or that Maya no the college computers just wouldn't open of me.

but even before I could render I was having a problem with my character, which was that every time I rendered it out the spider would just turn out to be black which isn't the right colour its supposed to be, it's supposed to be light brown. To fix this problem I got my tutor to look at it for me and he said that I saved the texture image on photoshop wrong and that maya wasn't recognising it. It was because when I was saving the texture image I was saving it when the format options was on 'progressive' instead of 'baseline ("standard")'. This fixed the problem and it was rendering out fine for now.

Another thing that happened to me was that I did something very stupid, which was I rendered out the wrong maya scene which had the type of lighting on so it casted different shadows on the tree and the spider. Where as the other scene was the updated version which had better lighting. I didn't notice this until I put the entire last scene together in After Effects because the lighting changed half way through. It wasn't to much of a pain to fix because I only had to render out 32 more frames to fix this but it's just that I had to re-render the scene again that annoyed me.

I think I messed this up because I was rendering out on about four different computers at the same time to I might of got confused on which scene I was rendering on which computer. I think I learnt that I need to keep my things more organised and labeled correctly.

   
   The image to the right shows how much I had to render out, and in each folder there is about 100-200 images of the animation and over all it comes to about 6.17GB worth of images I had. Also this file only contains half of our animation because Oscar rendered out the other half of the animation. We rendered the images as TIFs so that when we import them into After Effects we can change the black in the image to a sky.

Character and Narrative: Post Production Part 2

 Now that I've done with the colour correction part I can now think about placing a sky into the scene because it's just a white background at the minute. Oscar and I had a couple of thoughts about putting a realistic sky in the background with a sun and sky but we didn't think that would fit the style of the animation.

What I came up with instead was an effect in After Effects which is called a gradient ramp, this will help give the effect of a sky in our animation. I created this gradient ramp by creating a new solid layer in After Effects and then just added the effect to the solid layer, and the scene which has been rendered out as tif formats makes the scene images transparent, this helps see the gradient background when you put the two together.

I found this quite simple enough to do because I've done this kind of thing before so I knew what I was doing, However I did need to ask for Oscars help when it came to adding motion blur to the next scene.

Giving this scene the dolly zoom effect was quite hard to do and I kept gutting confused with the layers I was working on. To get the effect I had to duplicate the scene layer and then add the gaussian blur effect the the back layer. after I did that I then had to mask the top layer so that the blur would come through and you'd be able to see the blurred background and the clear bit on top. That was the simple bit the hard bit was swapping them round when the apple seemed to get closer to the spider, because I didn't know the simplest way to do that and I tried to do loads of things but the way I did it was I added two blurs and faded one out and the other in to achieve the effect.

I showed this to Oscar and he said that it looked good but the blur could be more intense, so that it intensified the situation. I did just that and made the blur even blurrier and hopefully this will increase the appeal of the animation.

Character and Narrative: Post production part 1

 In this stage of post production I spoke to Oscar and we both decided on what we where going to do about lighting and just fixing things up so that it will look beautiful as well as funny.

This process took time but when it's done are final  animation will look pleasing to the eye hopefully, and there where some complications because I hadn't used After Effects in a while so I had to get use to it again.



What I did was in the first scene I added a depth of field to the shot so that it look more realistic and so that it would make the shot more dramatic. I did this by duplicating the scene and them adding a mask to the bit I want to blur out to make the effect of depth of field.



After I sorted that out, I then added some colour correction to the scene just so that it adds something to the scene that I can't do in maya, also to brighten things up that didn't work well with the lighting I up in.



Withe the colour correction I placed auto levels on and just tweaked with the white clip and the blend with the original tools so that it brightens up the scene. I also added levels and just messed with the colours so that the colour was to intense but also not too dull. Then I added cc colour offset and changed the green phase in it so that I could add 6.0 more green to the environment.  

Character and Narrative: Playblast Preview

Now that Oscar and I have done all of the animating for the scenes we decided to play balst them all and then put the play blasts into premier to see what they'd look like when the scenes are all together. Oscar did this on his laptop and he got all my scenes from google drive, this meant that I didn't have to go out of my way messing with my files scene. 

We look through the whole animation and we thought it was looking good so instead of us criting it ourselves Oscar got Matt are tutor to crit it so we could get feedback on the animation. Matt send that some of the camera shots were unnecessary and that it distracts the audience from the scene, and he also  said that in some scenes that animation could be better, for instance in scene 17 the spider has jumped off and is now grabbing onto the grass, Matt said that there could be more bounce in the spiders web for when it approaches the piece of grass. We took Matt feedback and we decided to change a couple of movements and camera shots so that the camera is more still than before. 

The video below is the same one as Matt saw so it has not been changed yet but we will be making the changes and I will blog another video go it when its done.

Character and Narrative: Scene 19-20

In the final scene that spider is holding onto a piece of grass watching the inchworm getting squished be the other apple falling on top of it, the spider is in fear and releases the piece of grass and flings bak up to the tree branch in fear. 

This scene was pretty easy to animate because all I had to to was make the spider shake in fear and make the legs release the grass and elevate the spider back up to the tree branch. The hardest part of the animation was making the legs look like they were holding onto the piece of grass and making the release look realistic to. I did this by moving the eight legs one by one so that I don't get confused. 

I then animated the camera but I feel like the camera that I've animated needs to move less because it just makes the view loose focus on what's actually happening in the scene. So I'll change this when it comes to rendering out the frames because it would take too long deleting key frames on a camera.      

Character and Narrative: Scene 9-12

In this scene the spider just saw the inchworm jump off the edge of the branch and now gets pumped for jumping off the edge itself so it can eat the apple as well. 

I found animating this scene quite hard seen as though it has the most movement in it that I have to animate. For the scene I luckily could copy the same walk cycle as the one I used before, but I had to copy one leg at a time so it still took a long time to do. Then I had to figure out how I was going to move the spider from the side of the branch to the middle of the branch, so I solved this by making the spider jump into the middle. Creating the jump was difficult because of the amount I had to move in one for example the feet controllers, the neck/root controller and the main controller, this made me get very confused of what I was key framing and what needed to move where. 

After getting the right movements with the legs and head I then had to think about the secondary motion on the butt because it needs to jiggle. With the camera we thought about doing multiple shots when the spider is pumping itself up so that it would be more dramatic, I then thought it would be even better if we made the camera go in to the spider to first person view for when the spider crawls over the edge because I thought it would look cool if you got to see what the spider saw.       

Character and Narrative: Scene 4-5

Carrying from Scene 4/the previous blog, I added some more animation to the spider where the camera changes position to behind the spider and the spider starts to look behind it because it hears a strange noise from behind. 

This was also fun to animated because of the amount the butt jiggles a lot and I'm very immature. But in all seriousness I was going for secondary motion on the butt because it's so big it would look weird if I didn't make the thing jiggle a little bit. I didn't find any real trouble with animating the spider in this scene, he was just turing round so there was not much to do. 

If I had to change anything it would probably be the camera behind the camera because I feel like it moves too quickly panning upwards, so I think Oscar and I are going to have a look at the scene later and see how it fits in with the rest of the scenes.   

character and Narrative: Scene 4

In this scene the spider jumps back in fear of the hight and shuffles back up the branch backing away from the edge. The animation in this scene was fun to create because there was a lot of jiggle in the butt, also it was fun to try and animation the jump in the scene because I wanted it to look a realistic jump but also a pathetic scared jump, which I hope I've achieved.

However, the hardest part of the animation was the jump because there where multiple controllers I had to move at the same time. Controlling eight legs when a spider has to jump up and down is quite challenging but I feel like I've managed well but the legs do pop out at the top of the jump which annoys me so I might go back and fix that later on. The wiggle back that the spider does after it jumps is to show that the spider is cowering away from the edge. I show this by animating the butt moving side to side whilst also moving the main controller backwards to give the effect of the spider shuffling backwards in fear. 

    

Character and Narrative: Scene 1-3

In this first scene I animated the spider is walking towards the edge of the tree branch so that it can see the apple on the ground. Animating this scene was quite hard at first because I had to put in a walk cycle but after that it was simple enough, I did after that was make the spiders butt jiggle and also make its body shake so that it looks scared when it look at the distance between the branch and the apple. 

Doing the camera work was interesting because I added a dolly zoom, this is where the camera moves back from the subject/object but also zooms in which gives it that cool effect and adds intensity to the situation. This video below is just a test play blast just so that I can see what the animation will look like, so the spider in the video will have a different texture to it and the lighting will be different in the final edit as well.

All in all I feel like I've done a good job and Oscar seems to approve on it which it good, adding the texture and the lighting will be easy enough to do. One problem did arise when I tried importing the environment into the spider scene file which was that Maya kept crashing on me, so I solved that by importing the spider into the environment scene file and that just scaled both the spider and the environment so that they fit together correctly.    

Character and Narrative: Who is Doing What When Animating

When it comes to animating Oscar and I have come up with a plan so that we can evenly deal out work to one another. We decided to animate are own characters, however my character is shown the most throughout the animation so Oscar will animate a couple of scenes with my character so that the work load is equal.

In are animation there are twenty scenes throughout the story, so we decided that I could do scene 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19 and 20 that gives me 11 scenes but Oscar will be doing the title sequence as well as the scenes so that equals that out. After we finish animating we will that work on the lighting and put the whole thing together in After Effects, whilst fixing a few thing and neatening stuff up.

Doing all this will be easy because we now share a google drive folder so we can upload are scenes and have a look at each others work and give each other feedback. We also live together so if we do need each others help we can literally walk up to one another and have a talk about work. I find are time management is doable because we will be animating in one week, post production another week and then rendering the week after that.

Character and Narrative: Test Animation

Before I started animating I wanted to see how my spider would look like walking, so what I did was I looked at some references of spiders walking and tried my best to imitate the movements onto my spider in Maya. I knew this wasn't going to be easy because I've got eight legs to move around and the body to move up and down to. I found a really good reference gif to work off of because when I downloaded it off the internet it downloaded as an image sequence which gave me step by step reference images to work from. 

The hardest thing about a spiders walk cycle is that not all the legs move at the same time so I can't just select some legs and move them together, I have to move each leg separately, however there is a patten in the walk cycle. The patten goes as followed; on the left side of the spider the first and third leg go together but the third leg has a slight delay on it, the second and fourth leg then goes together after the first and third leg, with the fourth leg having a slight delay on it as well. On the right sider of the spider it's exactly the same but the other way round with the legs i.e the second and fourth leg starts moving first then the first and third leg moves afterwards. 

This was for me very hard to get my head around and it took me at least two hours to complete this task. This was because I kept having to look back and forth at the reference images multiple times just for one leg then repeat that another seven times. 

Character and Narrative: Environment With Texture

After me modelling the environment I gave the scene to Oscar so that he could texture the environment. He had a good idea when he started texturing it an it was that most of the time the camera would only be showing one side of the park, in which case we could be cheeky and get ride of the trees on the other side so that it would be easier to render out. Oscar also changed some trees by adding some more on the side the camera will be viewing and just tweaked some trees so that they all don't look so similar. 

Oscar made a couple of textures for the trees which where designed in photoshop using a square brush so that the texture will also fit in with the style of the environment, however he also made a texture out of triangles but you can't really tell when you're looking at the full scene. 

All in all I think that adding the textures had made an improvement on the whole scene and it's made it look like a animatable park environment. However I still feel like we could of added a lot more to the scene like benches and tables maybe some more bushes along side the edges of the environment, but that will slow down the render time and plus that camera will be focusing more on the spider and inchworm that the environment.   

Character and Narrative: Making The Environment

For the animation Oscar and I wanted to have a park like environment for the spider and inchworm to be in. So this is what I've done in Maya, I created the big tree in the middle and then to make thing easier I just duplicated the big tree and changed the tree a bit so that its' not a an exact duplicate. I've also made a walk path to make it look like a park and a little pond round the tree so that it isolates the spider and inchworm from the rest of the trees. I did this so that it give the spider a purpose to get the apple at the bottom of the tree because it can't cross through the water.

I also made a UV texture map for the trees so that I can give it to Oscar so that he can his textures on the trees. Making the UV texture maps was simple enough to do because they were just boxes, but he hardest thing in this scene was probably organising the trees in the outliner and name everything because I did that all at the end, so I had to go through all the different trees to figure out which one is which then name and order them. I did this to make it easier for Oscar to texture the right tree.   

I would of liked to make this scene bigger and have more trees in it but if I did that it would take so long to render every scene out which is what I don't want. I feel like I've done a good job of creating a park like environment and I like how the trees are evenly spaced out between one another.

Character and Narrative: Posed and Turnaround

After I've done al the modelling and rigging for the character I now have to pose my character on a plinth and do a turnaround of the pose. For the pose I decided to make the demo character look like it's in a dramatic scene shouting WHY or NO because I thought it would look theatrical. For the plinth I went simple and just got a cylinder and moved the vertices around so that it would look like a a tiny stage. The lighting is positioned so the the light hits the character from above, just so that it gives the look of the whole thing more intensity.

Positioning the character was simple enough to do because all I had to do was move the legs apart and bend them a little, move the arms up and bend them to, curl the fingers and ark the back. It may seem like a simple pose but the simplest of poses can change the tension of a scene so quickly.       

Character and Narrative: Finishing touches on Demo Character

For the finishing touches to the demo character all I had to do was take off some attributes that were not needed, just so that it doesn't look overly cluttered with stuff that I do not need. For example the head only moves in the rotational values so it doesn't need to show the translation or the scale values as well. By hiding and locking the translation and scale values on the head that means that I won't be able to move the head by mistake, I'll only be able to move the head in the rotational values.

 I found this process easy enough to do because it's just getting rid of things I do not need, but it was a long task to do because I had to do this for every controller. I also cleaned up the outliner so that I have groups for certain things i.e. mesh group, skeleton group, controller group, etc. I did this so that when I come back to animate this character I'll understand where everything is and what it is. 

Character and Narrative: Adding Custom Controllers on Demo Character

Putting in the custom controls was really interesting to me because making things move how you want with just one click of a button made me feel like I was achieving new skills in maya and once I got the hang of creating custom controls I could do this process quite quick.

What I had to do was make controls for the hand so that the fingers would curl into a fist. I did this by  selecting the thumb and then going into set driven keys and then loading up the hand controller and then messing with the attributes and hitting key till you get what you want. 

For the feet I had to do the same but I had to do four different custom controllers which manipulated the foot in different ways, for instance pealing the heal, making the toe tap, making the character stand on the tip of its toe, and doing a toe twist. doing this was harder than the hand because some of the controls had to be created with other controls like the stand tip had to be created with the toe tap and peal heal together.       

Character and Narrative: Connecting Controllers to Skeleton on Demo Character

Connecting the controllers to the skeleton was simple enough to do because I've done it before on my spider model, however there was more to do so it did take longer than expected. I did find one bit harder than the rest because I made a mistake on the legs. This mistake was that instead of putting a rotation plane solver in the leg I put a single chain solver in, which meant that when it came to connecting the point constraint to the knee it wouldn't let me and I got so stressed and couldn't figure out why, until my tutor came over and told me what I'd did wrong. 

In a way I liked that I had a mistake because I found out how to solve the problem I had and then I could help my peers out when the same problem happened to them. I feel like I've leant and understood how to properly rigg a leg using IK handles.   

Character and Narrative: Binding Skeleton the Mesh on Demo Character

Binding this character was harder than the spider because there is more joints in the demo character than the spider. Which means more painting the mesh after binding and it takes a long time to do when you're not paying that mush attention. I still found it simple enough to go through and I feel like if I do another character I'll be able to do this without looking at my tutors tutorials again. I didn't find any difficulty when I was doing this but I did get confused at some bit because I would mistake different joints up like the back and chest etc. 

Character and Narrative: Orienting Controllers on Demo Character

Orienting the controls was easier this time round because I already knew what I had to do due to me doing it on my spider character before. But on this demo character I had to do something different to what I had to do on me spider, which was I had to to sort out the orientations on the forearm roll because the wrist was at a different angle to the forearm so we had to re arrange the wrist orientation so that was in the same rotation angle as the forearm. This is because the wrist rotates on the forearm and not actually on the wrist. If I didn't do this the wrist would twist at a weird angle and would not look right, it would look deformed. 

This wasn't hard to do this task but it was tedious and long because you had to manually orient the wrist join and then do the whole orientating mumbo jumbo on top of that, but luckily I could only do this once because I could that mirror the new orientated joints across to the other side.     

Character and Narrative: Binding The Skeleton To The Mesh / And Influencing The Weights

Binding the skeleton to the mesh was the next thing to do which sounds easier that in looks because after you bind the skeleton you then have to paint the mesh which influences the weight/vertices so that when you move the leg for instance the other vertices on the leg next to it don't move around as well. 

Binding itself was alright because you just select the joints you want it influence the mesh and that go to smooth bind on the tool bar and sort some settings out and then press bind. However painting the mesh was harder than it seems because you have to paint every single joint and sometimes you can get confused on what joint you're painting on.

Overall I found this quiet difficult to get my head around to start with but once I got in the groove I was alright but some joints I still need to mess with so that when the spider is moving it looks some what norman. 

Character and Narrative: Connecting Controles to the Skeleton

Now that the orientation had been done I then had to connect the skeleton to the controllers so that I could manipulate the skeleton to move about. To do this I had to constrain the skeleton/joints to the controls however some joints had to be constrained differently because for example the eyes had to use a aim constraint to the controller so that when you translate the controller around the eye would follow. Another example of a different constraint that I had to use was a parent constrain which just parents the joint to the controller and I had to use that for the root joint so that the controller could move the whole skeleton.

This to me was easy enough to do and simple enough to follow because it's just connecting one thing to another. In the pictures below show me showing you me manipulating the root controller by moving it down a bit which moves the the joints down but keeps the legs where they are.    

Caracter and Narrative: Orienting The Controllers To The Skeleton

In this part of making the spider I had to make sure that the orientation of the skeleton is the same as the orientation of the controls, because if I don't make sure there the same when it comes to move the character the character will distort or they will become out of line and rotate differently to what you want the joint to do. 

For this I had to create a null group and attach it the joint and then orient those both together, after you orient them I deleted the null group and parented the joint to the controller and then freezed the transformations. This to me was difficult to understand at first because you have to be careful not to orient the joins in world but orient the joints in object so that the translators actually move right and match up with the controllers. This happened to me the first time I tried to orient the joints and controllers together, so I learnt this the hard way and had to orient the whole thing again.   

Character and Narrative: Creating The Skeleton and Controls

I now had to create a skeleton of the spider and then create some  controllers of the skeleton which would help manipulate the spider. Making the skeleton was easy to do because there was not many joints to create to make the spider move, the hardest part of the skeleton was the legs because the legs were so close together it was hard to see where a joint would go and how far away it was from the other joints. 

I then created some controllers and placed then on the skeleton were the skeleton would be manipulated and again the hardest part was the feet because I had to do eight different controllers for the eight legs there are. I didn't really need that many controls compered to the demo character I created just because the movements of the spider are quite minimalistic. After making the controls I then gave them a set colour, yellow for the middle of the spider, red for the right side of the spider and blue for the left side of the spider. I did this because it will help me see the controls better and it doesn't matter what colour I give the controls because they won't get rendered, however if you make a controller the colour green it will be hard for you to tell which controls you've selected, because when you select a control it turns green to let you know you've selected it.  

Character and Narrative: Finishing UV mapping

With UV mapping a character I had to go round the mesh and cut round the legs, head body, and then make seams down the sides of what I had separated so that I would be able to unfold the geometry like unfolding a sweetie wrapper. 

After I unfolded the net of the geometry I then had to organise each separate net so that the layout of all the nets put together would give some indication of the spider model. However, I did make one mistake by not cutting a seam correctly down on of the legs so that when I unfolded it, it just turned out to a bunch of squares bundled together. to fix this I had some help from my tutor and what we did was UV mapped the leg itself and then correctly cut down one side of it and unfolded it, then scaled it down to fit into the graph below on the left. 

I found this part simple enough to do once I've got my head around what I was supposed to be doing and I feel like I have UV mapped it well enough to understand hot to texture it later on when it comes to add detail to the spider.

    

Character and Narrative: Making My Spider Character

Knowing what I learnt from my tutors tutorials about creating a character, I decided to start having a go a modelling my character for the animation about the spider. But before I could start modelling in maya I had to do something in photoshop so that it would make modelling my character in maya much easier.

What I had to do was get my character designs, front and side view, and scale them together so that they are the same size so when importing them into maya I can use them for reference. I scaled the character designs by using the ruler tool in photoshop and lining them up to the same size. This was easy to do but by doing this will help me in maya to keep my model a consistent size and look in proportion.  

I wanted to make that spider in the same style as the environment, which is blocky. To do this I started off creating a square, then adding some edge loops and then extruding a face on one side and made that into the head. To create the legs I extruded them one by one and reshaped them so that the legs get chubbier at the end, but also I gave the spider little booties for feet to exaggerate the comedy factor of the animation. Most of the modelling was done by extruding faces and edges so it was simple enough to do without looking at the tutorials again. I feel like I've done a good job of modelling my character and I like the way it's come together, however rigging it and actually animating the spider will be a bit challenging but I'm looking forward to the final outcome at the end.

I'm also half way through giving my model a new UV texture map so that when it comes to texturing the spider it will be easy enough to figure out what part is what when we take the texture map into photoshop. My next thing to do to the model is finish off UV mapping the spider and then adding a skeleton to the mesh. This shouldn't take me too long to do but it will be hard because I will have to give the spider spline IK handles so that its legs spring.