All hail the sphere

Now we've been given our design brief and it's an interesting one. Our point of reference and of inspiration is http://www.cgsphere.com/. There are a lot of excellent idea on there which only seem to be limited by the artists imagination, unfortunately mine would need to be limited by my skills as unlike many of the submissions on cgsphere, my sphere would need to be animated. Hopefully though this would be a boon rather than a handicap.

I came up with a number of sphere-centric ideas...

1) Telepods as seen in the 1986 movie 'The Fly'
2) Tadpole in jelly egg.
3) Franken-sphere
4) Chimera sphere- with two animals becoming a sphere-like splice
5) Alien invasion of earth
6) Circus bear/elephant on a ball
7) Hedgehog going into a ball
8) HG Well's' Time machine a la the George Pal version
9) Hamster ball

Some of these ideas I liked visually as they would look very imaginative but would unfortunately show very little in terms of rigging/animation such as the Franken-sphere, the tadpole and the alien invasion of earth and since this was a task set to show our rigging and animation skills and not how creative we could be, those ideas were put on the scrap pile. Other ideas would show some animation but not a lot of rigging, such as the Time Machine so this was put on the scrap pile as well and I focussed on the ones I had remaining. That left...

Telepods from 'The Fly'
Hedgehog
Circus bear/elephant on a ball
Hamster ball

The Telepods would be a great animation but would be complicated to rig and animate, I would need four animated components:  The Pod, a person, the fly and the 'Brundlefly'. This would be arduous and a lot more technical and time-consuming but it would look excellent if I could achieve it.

The hedgehog would be a simple (I think) process to achieve but may not show enough in terms of rigging and animating.

The circus bear/elephant on a ball would be less complicated and would look great as would the Hamster ball, though the Hamster ball would have an aspect which as yet I was not sure how (if at all) I could achieve and that was transparency.

For practice I began work on creating simple models in Maya of the ideas to help me visualize and to see how complex they would really be...
                              

                     Maya Telepod                                          The Fly telepod

Dem bones

We’ve now been introduced to the concept of ‘bones in Maya, which I have to admit is more complex than I thought it would be. To help me understand it I’ve rewatched the video-tutorials on the subject that I mentioned in my last post. There are also various other bones video/pictorial tutorials on the internet such this one… Maya bones tutorial

Maya Bones...

The main issues with bones seems to be with regards to the orientation of the axis which links back to my blog post from my last module on 3D modelling, regarding 3-dimensional space representation using X, Y and Z axis. Link to previous blog post. This was a lesson I was thankful I had learned as it was in use quite a lot in 3D animation.

             

I’ve started to experiment with bones in Maya but I’m still unsure how to link this to my animation. For instance if the bones are added to a complete modelled Maya animation will they effect the movement? Are they visible throughout the process? Do they need to be animated independently? I will have to wait until our next lecture to find out as I don’t want to jump too far ahead with the video tutorials in case I’m learning extraneous information.

Confusion, thy name is Maya

In retrospect I should have 'kept my hand in' with Maya, as I hadn't really used it since our animation assignment and in truth was happy to leave it behind and now picking it back up again and incorporating the new information and facets of Maya is proving troublesome. I've been spending as much time as I can on Maya, relearning the ropes and getting to grips with the hierarchy that we have been taught.

In truth, learning hierarchy was not as difficult as I thought it might be, this is probably because hierarchy itself is quite intuitive and learning the order of parenting especially with humanoid models is as simple as thinking about which order my own body obeys the rules of the skeletal structure for instance the wrist having the least rotational and smaller joints having less rotation and having to move in relation to when and how the larger connected joints move. I researched forward kinematics and inverse kinematics, specifically inverse kinematics since this is what we would be using in Maya. Forward kinematics means that the in order for the model to move, the parent joint moves first, then the next ‘child’ down the hierarchy and then the next child.

Example of forward kinematics below...

Fortunately the type of modelling and animating we would be doing allowed for inverse kinematics once we had got the hang of the basics. According to Kuperberg et al (2002) inverse kinematics more closely mimics how the body moves but can be far more complex to rig and animate (2002:103). Using IK animation means that if for instance a leg was animated then all that would be needed to move the leg from point a to point be is to move the foot and the rest of the leg would follow.

With all the above in mind I tried some simple animations in Maya, just using small, easy-to-animate forms such as my MayaBirds animation which can be viewed in my folders.

                                          Maya birds screenshot

Hitting the books...

Received our brief and as always, my first stop was the library (NUCA and public) to pick up some research books.

Being as the large majority of the FGA was being done in Maya, I focused my book search on Maya and Maya character animation.

I found the following books...

Game Art Complete - Andrew Cahan: This book mainly dealt with subdivision modelling but did have some information on rigging and animating in Maya.
3D Toons  - Steve and Raf Ansovin: Although this book also had little in the way of rigging, it did have a lot of information on character animation and movement which I think will be helpful when creating my short animation in Maya.
Learning Maya: Character Rigging and Animation -- Dwelly et al: Though since the book was written (2003) Maya has come a long way and is now a lot more intuitive, the books basics remain relevant and I was able to transpose a lot of the books teaching to Maya 2010 without a problem.
Character Animation -- Doug Kelly: This was another book that dealt mainly with character creation and polygonal modelling with very little information on Maya.
The Art of Game Characters -- Leo Hartas: Although devoid of any information on rigging, this book was useful to see how character are designed and which type would work best in my simple animation.

I also hit the forums again, which I've found to be invaluable as they can connect you with experts. On CGTalk http://www.cgtalk.com/ I placed a post requesting recommendations for the best rigging books/websites. On their advice I picked up two DVD's on Maya character rigging which were Gnomon's 'Character Rigging' and 'Animator Friendly Rigging' by Digital-Tutors. These DVD's were excellent as although they repeated a lot of what we had been shown already in the tutorials, they provided refreshers and simple tasks which helped me get to grips with Maya again.