Human Model - Female

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

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.

Oriental Fan 3D Model

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.

Python Scripting in Maya

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 :)