Rigging 3D

iPad2

2011-10-25T12:59:00.001-07:00

I went to the GDC Online in Austin, TX a couple of weeks ago, and I won an iPad2 in a drawing from one of the exhibitors. I didn't even have a laptop (lets just say that because of a lack of funds, I rarely buy any tech stuff), and I never expected I'd ever win anything so cool. It's a great device. The first thing I did with it was download Angry Birds and play it. Then when hubby said (rather derisively) that I had what amounted to a $600 game machine, I wondered if there was something else I could do with it. A few days later I was dreaming of having a Cintiq, and then I wondered if I could draw on the iPad. It turns out you can! And I did.

This is the first drawing I did with Adobe Sketchbook Express. I did this with my finger LOL I have ordered a Wacom Bamboo stylus and am going to download the Pro version of Sketchbook. I have never been very good at drawing on a regular wacom tablet, I'm much better on paper. I suppose it's because it's hard with a tablet to see what you're doing (hence wanting a cintiq). I think that winning the iPad2 might be the best thing that's ever happened for my traditional drawing skills :)

A new character...

2011-10-05T21:49:00.001-07:00

...that I haven't come up with a name for yet. It just sorta popped into my head the other day, and so I started working on sketching and fleshing it out. I did a rotation today and wanted to post it. The character's clothing is based loosely on what early 20th century pilots would have worn. I'm thinking the character needs a zepplin as a prop.

Next step, I'll be modeling and texturing it in Maya. And hopefully come up with a name...

Rough Sketch

Cleaned-up Rotation

Spider Web Animation

2011-07-11T21:11:00.000-07:00

This is my first attempt at animating in Flash (version CS3). It's a simple and cartoony spider building a web. I would like to do a more detailed version now that I understand how flash works. I would also like to do a different aspect ratio next time. I accidentally went with the default size and would prefer to work at 720x480.

Human Model - Female

2011-06-04T10:50:00.000-07:00

If you know me, you know I'm primarily an animator and rigger, but I decided that I like modeling too and would like to improve. That is why I started modeling things for TurboSquid. I think my modeling has improved immensely since I began doing that and so the other day I decided to model a human. I've started it and when I have the preliminary geometry done, which I'm hoping will be later today or tomorrow, I'll post a render.

Mechanical Rigging: A Patio Umbrella

2011-06-01T07:36:00.000-07:00

I decided that rigging an umbrella would be interesting, and so I've done a patio umbrella, it's available at turbosquid.

The hardest part was figuring out how to make the umbrella's arms work. I tried various constraints without hitting on anything that worked the way I wanted it to, so I put the model aside for a day and then it hit me at some point that using IK would work. So that's what I did. It works like a charm too.

Knight T-Shirt Design

2011-05-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

I went looking for some t-shirts with medieval themes, but found few that were any good. Here's one I started last night and finished today. It's for sale on children's and adult's t-shirts at cafepress.com.

Oriental Fan 3D Model

2011-04-20T20:56:00.000-07:00

I modeled something pretty cool today, an oriental fan! It's available for sale at turbosquid.com. I'm very happy with how it turned out. It took me a while to work out how I was going to get the paper part of the fan to deform and I tried two methods before finally figuring out what worked. Check it out, there are .mov files over at TurboSquid that show it deforming.

Brand New Facial Rig

2011-02-27T10:51:00.000-08:00

After posting the instructions on how I made the old facial rig I designed, I decided that I would re-design it. I had already taken some of the 11 Second Club's models for my students to rig, since they're such nice models and work so well for animation and facial animation. The geometry is also clean and simple enough that they're easy for my students to work with. I like the model that they designed for the club, and after stripping the rig out of the model in Maya, I exported the model as an .obj to 3ds Max.

I started it by adding some shapes where I wanted deformation, I added some helpers and constrained them using position constraints and look-at constraints. I liked how it was moving, and then I walked away and slept on how I was going to hook all that up to some kind of interface that would make it easier for an animator to work with. The next day, yesterday, I got back to work on it, and had the brilliant idea of using a Position List with multiple XYZ Positions instead of using a ton of helper nodes. That in and of itself made the rig much smaller, with much fewer nodes.

If you're interested in more details about how I did this, some of it is similar to the tutorial I posted earlier, or just drop me a line.

Facial Rig for 3ds Max

2011-02-25T10:50:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Jason Osipa

I thought I would put this tutorial that I did for a facial rig online. It's a little old, and probably could be improved upon, but it worked well, including working for export to the Gamebryo Game Engine.

The tutorial can be found here (.pdf format)

Google Art Project

2011-02-01T09:14:00.000-08:00

This is the most amazing thing ever and I am so excited about it.

http://www.googleartproject.com

Google is mapping museums the same way they've mapped all the streets. You can walk through and see works of art in great detail. They've not mapped the entire National Gallery in London yet, so they've not made it to my favorite piece which is Meindert Hobbema's Avenue at Middelharnis, but I'm sure they'll get there eventually. This would have been a great tool to have when I took Art History. It was often hard to find works of art, and when you did, they were often a little black and white picture in a book. Check it out.

New Demo Reel

2011-01-25T18:20:00.000-08:00

I figured it was time for a new demo reel. I put some of the recent stuff I've been working on, on it. There's no sound, my internet is so slow, it takes long enough to upload without it, and is superfluous anyway.

= Reel Breakdown =

Cave Girl - Responsible for Design; Modeling and UVing (Maya 2008); Rigging and Animating (3ds Max 2011)

Giraffe - Responsible for Modeling, UVing, Texture Mapping, Rigging and Animating (Maya 2008)

Pulse!! Game - In game animation, Responsible for Rigging and Animation (3ds Max 8); exporting to Gamebryo Game Engine

BaIt - Student film, Responsible for Bat rigging (Maya 8.0)

Cave Girl Running with Spear

2011-01-23T21:07:00.000-08:00

I decided to animate my cave girl character running with a spear in hand, as I mentioned earlier. This started with research, with my mother-in-law and I running across the deck with a wooden curtain rod in hand LOL I'm thinking if the neighbors on the hill saw us, that they'd think we lost our minds.

It took me a few hours to get it polished up. I like it and Andy liked it too. He said she had character, which is great!

Next I'd like to animate my cave girl throwing the spear. And get around to modeling her saber tooth cat friend. There's just not enough hours in the day. I work on my art and it's bedtime before I know it.

Cave Girl Walk Cycle v.2

2011-01-23T12:13:00.001-08:00

I did another walk cycle with the Cave Girl I modeled. This one I spent more time on than the first one, which was hastily thrown together just to see how the character was moving.

I'm going to do some more animation with her, a run cycle and maybe have her carrying and throwing a spear. That's my plan anyway.

Kitty!

2011-01-22T12:28:00.001-08:00

I designed a saber-tooth cat to go with my cave girl. I'm going to model it soon, but I like it so much I decided to put the drawing of it I did on here. I went through about four iterations, some of the first ones looked too dog-like, and while a saber-tooth dog would be amusing, it wasn't quite what I was going for.

Cave Girl Model

2011-01-20T21:38:00.000-08:00

I designed a cartoon-y cave girl last week. I modeled and UV'd it in Maya 2008, and then decided to get 3ds Max's free 30 day trial and I rigged and animated it in Max. I am going to work on it some more. I'd like to get the lighting better, as I know nothing about the proper render settings in Max, having only worked in Game Dev with Max, where everything was exported to Gamebryo. The movement is also a little stiff I think, but I'm tired and it's late so I'll work on it some more tomorrow or maybe the next day.

Tomorrow is the first day of school, except I'm not a student this time. I'm teaching a rigging class! I hope it will be fun...

Winchester .243 Model

2011-01-15T11:50:00.000-08:00

I decided to model my beautiful .243 Winchester Model 70 Featherweight. Here are some renders:

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Click for the larger version. Available for sale at TurboSquid.

I never realized how complex the bolt was in it until I started looking closely at how it worked. And that explains why bolt action firearms are a fairly recent invention!

Drawings in Pencil

2011-01-01T14:54:00.000-08:00

I drew a couple of pictures for my uncle-in-law and aunt-in-law for Christmas:

Click for larger.

Art and stuff

2010-12-04T18:13:00.000-08:00

Wow, it's been nearly a month since I've written. I haven't worked all that much in Maya, I've been doing other creative stuff. I did play around with shaders the other day, animating them. I was trying to get a Len Lye type animation out of animating them, but it didn't quite turn out the same way. I decided if you stared at it long enough, you might just have a seizure ala Japanese Pokemon LOL and so that's why I've not posted it.

I'm thinking about getting back into traditional drawing, since I've not done any in a while. I'm also thinking about getting an MFA, but I don't know when I could start on it. That's really about all I have to write about at the moment.

Python Scripting in Maya

2010-11-06T16:37:00.000-07:00

I haven't had a chance to work much with Python in Maya, so today I decided that I would try to write some kind of script in Python. Here it is:

Click on the image for a larger version. It's a very simple script, it just makes a joint chain, adds IK to it, and then makes sliders that control the IK Blend and twist. The only problem I had making it was that, as you may know, MEL and Python are case-sensitive like most programming languages and I had a capital letter where there should have been a lower case letter. It took me a while to find the problem LOL!

I think that I will try to alter the script to get some kind of iteration out of it, using for or while loops, etc. That will be my next goal, unless I decide to do something else first :)

Shark Attack!

2010-11-05T18:38:00.001-07:00

Hehe...

As some of you may know, I'm currently seeking employment. This morning I received an email from Collision Studios. They wanted me to take a rigging and animation test and had sent me a shark model to do just that with. They said they send the test to all candidates. No better way to get me to work! I had it rigged in about two hours, if that, and started animating on it right away. I finished animating it about dinner time and decided to make a playblast of it and put it on my blog.

*model provided by/property of Collision Studios

Nothing Much Here

2010-11-04T20:06:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I have to admit that I've not worked on anything in the last couple days. I've got my computer up and running and everything is back in order, but I've been busy getting things ready for hunting season which starts this weekend. I had intended to study some C++ today, but the day sorta got away from me.

Bad Drive

2010-11-02T16:11:00.000-07:00

My hard drive died yesterday so it might be a few days before I post another update. I had to go buy a new drive and I'm still in the process of getting everything installed on the new drive.

Giraffe Seamless Texture Painting

2010-10-31T12:35:00.001-07:00

I wanted to write about how I did the spots on the giraffe to make them seamless. This process is different in Maya than how I would or could have done it in 3ds Max. In 3ds Max I would have painted the spots in Photoshop first, and then used render-to-texture to render out the seams so that I could paint them and then overlay them in photoshop. Maya has a 3D paint tool however, and this made it simpler in many ways than having to paint over the seams. You can find the 3D paint tool under (Rendering Menu) Texturing --> 3D Paint Tool []

I painted spots on the giraffe model itself using compositor's green. That way I would have a guide to paint by in photoshop. Maya saves out a .tif file that has what you've painted on it. To the left is the file that Maya saved out with the green spots that I painted on it.

After opening this file in photoshop, I was able to use the 'magic wand' select tool to select only the green and then I could paint the spots where the green was. This assured me that the seams would line up. This worked like a charm, and here is the final map with the texture painted on it.

This giraffe is available for sale at TurboSquid.

Giraffe Rendered Walk Cycle

2010-10-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

I left my computer to render last night and it was finished this morning. I've uploaded the rendered version to youtube. The only problem with youtube is the quality is a bit worse than if I hosted the video myself because they're compressing an already compressed video, but I would probably eat up all of my storage space on my website if I hosted every video there. I also can't really get the quality any better (i.e. uncompressed) because of our internet connection. We live way out in the country and all we have is mobile wireless, no cable, no DSL. So, it is what it is :)

Giraffe Walk Cycle

2010-10-29T19:39:00.000-07:00

Here it is!

I didn't get all of it rendered, but did get the last half done so I thought I would go ahead and post it. I merged the last rendered half with the first portion as a playblast so you can see the rig. I will post the fully rendered version tomorrow.

Youtube has some strange artifact-ing going on in a couple of frames, and that is not there in the original. I guess it's their compression. I would try to upload it again, but we have a fairly slow mobile wireless connection so I'll just live with it.

Giraffe Walk Update

2010-10-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

After all that rendering I found a problem with the back leg, it's a bit wrong. I'm going to work on it some more, and maybe get the animation posted tonight. Maybe I'll just post the playblast as soon as I'm done, and then I can post the rendered version whenever it's finished. I'll see, our internet is being really slow today. I didn't see the problem with the leg until I saw the rendered version, I think the shadows accentuated the problem. It's a good thing, I want it to be right.

So, check back later today (or maybe tomorrow) for the animation.

I need a render farm LOL

2010-10-28T22:19:00.000-07:00

I've finished a walk cycle for the giraffe, and I was hoping to post it tonight, but that ain't going to happen. It's after midnight and there's still over a hundred frames to render. I will post it tomorrow, hopefully early in the day, and then I can get back to work on the temple room that I designed.

First post!

2010-10-26T19:21:00.001-07:00

I thought that I would start a blog to keep up with what I'm working on at the moment. I decided last night to model a temple, I had an idea in my head of how it should look, but then my computer went a bit crazy, and I had to run check disk. Long story short, I had some bad sectors on the hard drive, it seems to have recovered my files and everything seems fine, for now anyway. I guess I need to look into getting a new hard drive.

I have been updating my website with what I'm working on, but it's a bit cumbersome to edit the html code every time I want to update, blogger is so much easier.

The latest thing I've posted on my website is a rotation of the giraffe model I did.