Monday 31 May 2010

Maya Brief

In this project I have been asked to make a fully 3D object, that is fully rigged and capable of animation. It can be what ever I choose to do, however it has to stick to a sphere shape in accordance to the rules and regulations of the brief and the website which we also be basing our objects on: www.cgsphere.com

Sunday 30 May 2010

Research and Tips

Here is where I will list references to all the videos, tutorials and websites that will help me with my work:

This is a good website with not tutorials per-say more step by step guides on what to do and what not to do when using programs such as maya. The link below shows how to arrange objects in a hierarchy. The website is http://guerrillacg.org/

The link below shows another guide to help with parenting and hierarchies this time with a robot. I shall follow this guide and create a robot of my own to get used to how hierarchies should be arranged.


This is a very simple tutorial on how to rig a basic polygon however I found it helpful because having only used Maya once before for another project I am unsure how to rig objects.

Starting off

To start off I decided to come up with some quick idea's. I did this by first viewing some completed spheres on http://www.cgsphere.com to see what others had done. I edited the search to show just what others had done with the software I will be using, Autodesk Maya. This is called The Lambda by Ruski_xx and is a sphere with the design of Half Life and the main character Gordon, with the crowbar in the image as well (which is the main melee weapon in the game) to add more emphasis on the style of the sphere.


This is another piece by newmain entitled Space Chair, it is a detailed design compared to The Lambda and has more intricate pieces inside the design. However this is a bold design in that it is not a complete sphere but a sphere cut in half then texture added to it. This helps me in the sense that I know whatever I make can resemble a sphere but not be a perfect one.



Saturday 29 May 2010

Ideas

Here are some quick ideas I had for the sphere project, the first one I had was to design a sphere made of lego. The animation would be lego blocks building on top of each other to create the sphere. I liked this idea and thought it could work well but creating each individual block and making them fit together flush enough to create a sphere seemed an unnecessary difficulty.

The second rough design was of a bird of some sorts, it was going to be a fly but decided rather than creating a set of legs just a pair of legs and wings would be easier to manage and animate in the long run. Once the drawing was half completed I had completely gone off this design and feel as though I should have kept on with the drawing to see how well it could've worked. However I still feel as though it wouldn't of been the right choice.

Another design idea I had was to have a spider drop down of a web and curl its legs into itself to create a sphere. I had high hopes for this idea as the animation seemed fairly straight forward and the design seemed simple enough. However once I go into the Maya file and started to design the spider I realized it would be alot more complicated than I first thought.

Friday 28 May 2010

Try Outs

So I tried out a few different ideas on Maya to see what design I would use as my final choice. First of I tried out a simple sphere styled robot with two arms, similar to what we did as a practice piece earlier this week. This worked well but I felt it wasn't what I wanted as a final piece. I then tried my first idea of a spider which would come down from the top of a web and curl its legs into itself to create a perfect sphere, this design was perfect however I began to realize that the animation would be too complicated to get done in the time span and would rather have a simple design with smoother animation then the other way around. I then began a design on my final idea of a helicopter, this proved to be a successful idea and have decided to go with this as my final piece.


Thursday 27 May 2010

Chair

We had another practice and using tools in Maya such as Lamberts, Clusters, Curves, Polysurfaces, Vertex, Edges and Faces. All of these are useful tools and tips to remember when it comes to doing my own design. Using the face tool to select certain faces of an object and then being able to edit it in any way to make a completely different object, this works well by using the vertexes and edges of an object as well.


Wednesday 26 May 2010

Step by Step

Here is some step by step versions of my helicopter, this is just to show my progression and how well I am doing so far.

This is my first attempt at the helicopter design however I made I large mistake, I had been using nurbs instead of polygons. This would prove to make my work alot harder to do and instead of turning all the nurbs into polygons I decided to scratch that and start again.


Now that I knew what I wanted I set out the helicopter into pieces and then will simply join them together later on once I have altered them into the shapes I want.


As you can see I have joined the objects together and have altereed them into the shapes you see. I have also textured these with blinns for the time being just to get a feel as to what it could look like. I have also begun the design on the rope ladder that I wil rig and animate alongside the helicopter.


This is my first design of a rope ladder which has two set of joints. However this did not work to a good standard and was making the animation not as fuild as it could.

The new design of the rope ladder has only one set of joints, I created 2 identical cyclinders and duplicated a cube as the steps in the ladder. Then using the insert loop edge tool created edges on the cylinders. Then attatched the cubes with the merge vertex tool. Then placed a joint in the middle of the ladder using the steps as a guide line.

I added in the plane from cgsphere and used the ball as a reference, I added in lights and tetures to the scene to give the animation more effect.