For the final week, I covered a lot more ground than I would have liked to (such is the way with most of my projects this semester). I realised when attempting to use a CG texture to wrap my major elements that it would require much more effort. Particularly when the first texture looked something like this…
…it looked terrible. It reminded me of all those lazy 3D works that I pointed out earlier in the semester, so I was determined not to go down that path. In fact, I was so determined that I essentially remodelled most of the scene to allow me to correctly UV map the textures for each element…
Because of the modular nature of my scene, I didn’t want each polygon to appear to have the same texture. Instead of mapping every single element with a different image, I created a few variations and randomly applied them, to give the appearance of each being different. I also created a ‘bump map’, by importing a high-contrast black and white image as a node of the texture, to give a little more realism when lit. I realised pretty quickly that I was on the right track this time…
When put alongside the lazily prepared CG textures, the difference is like day and night…
After texturing all the elements already in my sketch, I added some very basic human figures on the roof of the tower. I had decided a few weeks back that this would create a far more interesting narrative than simply placing people where you would expect them, or not having anyone there at all…
I also added a cyclorama backdrop for the evening sky. I still wasn’t sure exactly what angle I would be rendering from, so using the inside of a cylinder allowed me to change my mind, without needing to shift too many objects around…
Finally, adding the lights was a process of trial and error. Particularly in relationship to the glowing effect I had on all the windows, every light affected every other luminous element. For myself, who has never modelled before, this was a matter of going through all the different types of lights and experimenting with their intensity, colour, direction, and so on…
In the end however, the image came together better than I had hoped (particularly considering the amount of work I found myself left with in the last week). There’s not much left to say, except: here is the final result…
I’ve found myself struggling to come to terms with the modelling side of Maya this week. It really seems like we’ve entered a completely new world of CG. Obviously we could have spent a lot more time learning these concepts and in fact I probably would have preferred the semester to be weighted more in that direction. Animation seemed much simpler to get a grasp on. Having said that though, it is a lot of ground to cover in a 12 week semester, particularly when it’s running in parallel to 3 other practical subjects (but that’s a winge for a different post).
Moving ahead from my capsule of last week, this is the first strange problem I came across…
…I got it in my head that everything must be beveled when modelling, to allow light to pick up the edges of the polygon. However, it didn’t want to play nicely with my capsule. After some hunting through random settings, I managed to get the above crazy looking shape. It would be cool, if it wasn’t completely useless for my project. I decided to move on without the precious bevelled edges.
One capsule was fairly manageable, but two columns, surrounded by capsules was a prospect that quickly became a little harder to navigate…
I found that when selecting capsules to rotate or move, things became quite problematic. Not only when the selection would pick other elements that I did not intend to choose, but also when grouping larger sections to edit. Grouping tended to change the point of rotation from the centre of the object to the centre of world (zero on each of the axes), or another random position. This is one of those quirks of Maya that I would like to get to the bottom of, but under the pressure of quickly evaporating time, I simply did my best to work with it.
I then decided that keeping things on different layers and colour coding them was the way forward…
…this image shows the base of the tower as well as a couple of the surrounding buildings, which will create the backdrop for the tower.
If time permits, I’ll be adding some smaller elements, like signage, street posts and a few more background buildings, before moving onto the texturing and finally lighting. But I’m going to have to move quickly!
After the relative ease of dealing with the dice last week, I looked at some architectural ideas for my modelling project. I have always been a fan of minimalist design, and the seemingly simple, geometric shapes of minimalist architecture sounded like a perfect direction for my project: simple, but if done well, very effective.
A couple of great architects I came across via ISO50 were Tom Kundig and Jamie Darnell. Not only are these fantastic examples of minimalist design, but the lighting in a couple of the shots really caught my eye. Lighting seems to be something that can make or break a CG model, and a carefully considered lighting design, coupled with some clean, minimalist lines could be a good move.
An architecture student friend of mine then suggested that I take a look at the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. It pretty much ticks all the boxes: great design, check; simple but quirky character, check; it’s in Japan, check… it’s all there really. Sold.
The obvious place to start was with the capsules. To save myself a lot of work, I’ll be duplicating them until the cows come home…
…it’s not a flying start, but I’m on my way.
As pointed out in the tutorial, a narrative is fairly important for this project. We won’t be doing an animation – just modelling and render – for this work, so the image really should be saying something. And a building doesn’t say a whole lot without some context. So I have decided to use my idea of strong lighting and set the image up at night.
Ideally, I would like to create some of the buildings surrounding the Nakagin Tower (but to a lesser detail) and have a few of the lights on inside these skyscrapers. Instead of people inhabiting the buildings though, I would like to see silhouettes of people standing on top of the Tower and the surrounding structures. With some eerie night lighting, this could set up a kind of dialogue that whilst fairly abstract, could hopefully spark a bit of conversation.
I’ve found myself falling a bit behind this week after a dose of the flu, a few exciting new tests at the doctors and The Finders Keepers markets…
Not attending the lecture or tutorial was always going to put me behind the 8-ball for this subject, as we cover so much ground so quickly. I have already found modelling to be a far more complex topic than animation and given the choice, I think I would prefer to stick to the latter. There are so many layers (literally and metaphorically) in modelling, that it’s easy to find yourself quickly lost, and in my case – frustrated.
Yet again, my respect for those artists that do 3D work well has jumped up a few notches.
Work
Asking around to see what I missed during the tutorial, I was pointed in the direction of the dice texturing lesson. Of course, a dice is quite literally the most basic 3D polygon you can come across, so probably a perfect first step for me.
The main lesson here was to understand that to texture a shape, you need to imagine it as an unfolded, flat version of itself. In the case of the above box, it’s not much of a stretch of the imagination…
The above shows the flat texture laid over the top of the unfolded box (shown by the white outline). This is in the UV window of Maya and will likely become a heavily used tool in the future. Here is where you can line up textures, resizing and fitting to each polygon, so that when it is again in its 3D form, the edges don’t look unnatural. Of course, in the case of the dice, it’s not really an issue…
So there is my very first texturing effort. Simple, but I’m guessing it’s a method I’ll be using for the final modelling project. I doubt that I’ll be taking on anything like a human face though – the unwrapping of a polygon that complex sounds nothing short of frightening.
After my complete spat last week, this modelling tutorial ended up feeling like a walk in the park. Maya decided to cooperate and, dare I say it, I possibly even enjoyed the process!
Unfortunately though, I have found myself behind the eight-ball after losing a lot of time (read: getting cranky) last week and then getting a little bit sick this week too (no, not the swine flu). The head cold was just severe enough to make me totally uninterested in doing any work over the past few days. I guess that’s the way things go as you reach the end of semester.
Work
So this is the point I was totally stuck at last week: being able to select vertices individually. It makes extruding the pages from the book cover all but impossible…
With that finally done, it was now a matter of duplicating the book and scaling to give the effect of a complete library…
The chair steps within the tutorial were probably what I found the most interesting. The following came from one simple polygon cube…
Some cleverly planned subdivisions allowed the legs and back support to be extruded from the cube (more of a thick plane by this stage) and the horizontal back supports appeared via a simple bridge and curving. This process made me quickly realise that a bit of pre-planning can go a long way in CG.
Rendering objects with light and colour wasn’t outlined in the tutorial particularly well and seeing as I hadn’t experienced this section before, the instructions during the lecture simply didn’t stick. However, a bit of trial and error got me here…
Adding a couple of lights seemed to blow everything out in the render however. Whilst Maya looked similar to the above image, the render looked far more overexposed…
Finally, a little bit of trial and error got me to an acceptable light level…
Obviously, I have settings (once again) a bit out of whack somewhere in Maya. Unless the render engine truly is this unpredictable, I would have thought what I see in Maya would be far closer to the final rendered result.
Amongst my ever-increasing tasks for the next week, I will have to get to the bottom of these discrepancies, as well as fine tuning the modelling to get a more realistic look.
There seems to be two camps on licensed software (well, three if you include those who choose to avoid the license altogether). There are those people who believe that they are getting a high quality product, because they have forked out their hard earned money for it and are determined to get proficient at it and there are those that believe that when you do fork out that hard earned money, you have paid up for your right to point out the programs faults. I fall – heavily – into the latter.
I have to say, Maya has this week really pushed me to the edge of my sanity. Along with Pro Tools, it’s become one of those programs that I began to wish I hadn’t purchased. Terrible customer service (I went through literally days of emails and phone calls to deal with licensing issues), poor stability and an interface that only a mother could love, make both of these programs something of a nightmare until you’re totally comfortable finding your way around them. I think the term ‘industry standard’ is dangerous here and when it becomes more important than usability, there’s something clearly wrong. I’ll save my rant about Adobe for another day…
Work
From the above spat, it’s pretty clear that I had a bunch of problems with the homework for this week. We began our move from animation to modelling this week, after finishing the first project, and launched into a tutorial outlining how to create a desk and chair setting with polygons.
So off I set, into the wonderful world of modelling…
I ran into some problems extruding surfaces, but struggled through, kind of thinking to myself ‘oh, this is just one of the joys of Maya’. It wasn’t working as simply as the tutorial would have me believe, but I did get part way through with minimal use of coarse language.
Then… BAM! I simply couldn’t get vertices to function as they should have. I swore many, many times, tried to Google the solution, swore many more times, asked for help on Omnium, swore again and then determinedly walked away from the program.
I had a pretty good feeling that I’d screwed something up within Maya’s complex tool setting system, so when I came back to it I tried restoring to default settings, without any luck. It wasn’t until I took my laptop into my tutorial that my tutor instantly spotted the problem. Hidden within one of the menus is an option to select around your selection, much like feathering in Photoshop. It’s used for adding smooth textures later in the process, but as an added bonus, it can really screw up your life when trying to edit polygons.
For anyone running into a similar problem, this is what to look out for…
‘Soft Select’ is the offending parameter. I was ready to totally flip out until being shown my mistake (how I actually switched it on in the first place is beyond me – I’d never seen the setting before), but once unticked my life became good again. It’s amazing how quickly you forget how frustrated you were once things actually work. So now, I just need to catch up on all that time wasted!
I really didn’t expect to spend so much time fine tuning my animation over the past week or so. In the end, I think the movement I attempted was too complex and the many keyframes I added early on made the later stages more difficult than they otherwise would have been.
It is these later stages that you’re really able to breathe some life into the character, so in the end my little golden man looks a bit floaty and doesn’t appear to have the mass that I would have liked. However, I have to say that I really learnt a lot by going through this process from start to finish. Although I definitely made some mistakes this time around, I have a better understanding of how to start any similar projects, and avoid many troubles in the future.
Work
So here is the little bugger. Like a crazed wooden life drawing doll:
In case it’s not as obvious as I hope, he’s a skateboarder. Because we couldn’t use props for this animation, he’s hovering just above the ground and stays in one spot (it would be a Hanna Barbera-esque animation, where the background whizzes by the cycling character).
I would have liked to add some more bounce and overlap in the animation, but it started becoming far too complex amongst all the keyframes, so I ended up letting it go as it is.
Even with all my complaints about the animation, it has come together reasonably well in the end. I wouldn’t mind having another shot at it, but starting afresh at some point. But for now, I need some sleep.
The transfer from video reference to my five key poses was my focus for this week. Taking what I saw as the primary positions for my animation and wrangling with my biped character, I found pretty quickly I was working from the wrong starting point.
I was originally using the FK character, but came across trouble as I was trying to rotate the elbow. The movement as the skateboarder shifts and transfers his weight between almost standing, to push and finally jump, is quite fluid and effects each joint independently. So I returned to the beginning with the IK character instead.
Whilst the IK character took a while to get used to (the limbs flail about like a puppet on a string), I think in the end it will give me more control and a (hopefully) more realistic movement. Here’s where I’m at so far…
1. Starting Pose
2. Push
3. Squat
4. Jump
5. Land
Whilst I identified these as the major keyframes, there are clearly a lot of frames that I will need to add to create the arcs of movement needed to make this action realistic. I think the sequence I have chosen will be quite complex, but if I manage to get it looking okay, should be great.
Inspiration
I had a look around YouTube for some CGI skateboarder work and the result was dire. I mean really, really bad. Here is an example of pretty much everything that you can do to make computer animation look terrible…
…awful filters, thoughtless camera angles and no attempt at making the skateboarder look like he’s got any weight, or real world physics to contend with. It’s all bad.
So instead, I looked up Travis Pastrana for inspiration. Not because it’s helpful to this weeks work, but because I needed a laugh after the last video…
"a reasonable person would find it offensive" - I haven't seen a lot of reason in the art vs child pornography debate... http://j.mp/bxMO2B 23 hours ago
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