#cgintro

[sdmilnesjournalba1b]

After a technical issue yesterday we had to postpone our next bit of CG induction until today. The task was to work with a pre-made model of a person and produce two animations: one reaction emotion and another as a double-take to the camera.

Here are the two results of the reaction animation on with the tweened motion by Maya in between keyframes and the other without. It was good fun playing around with how the model could be posed especially the face and positions of the eyes and eyebrows, and just seeing what could be done with more complex and detailed model. The process of the reaction was fairly simple, merely picking a finishing pose to end in and allowing Maya to do the inbetween frames. Although there’s also the addition of the bent down position the key was again keeping keyframes to a minimum and working mainly with the graph editor when manipulating the pacing and easing of the movements.

This is the result of the double-take animation, where the character had to react in sit-com style to the preset camera. Again the process was working through the keyframes, of which there were more this time, and checking the movement in between for inconsistencies. In this instance everything worked well part from the hand moving up to the final pose which, because of Maya’s straightforward animation, looked like this:

As such, because it was a slightly more complex movement than anything in the reaction animation an additional keyframe was required to make the movement look right, even though it can barely be seen.

This less contorted pose keeps the movement believable and in line with the capabilities of a real human.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with both animations, once I’d got the hang of how to use the controllers it was very logical to follow how to move things to the right place. It was good to be able to work with a fully movable face compared to any of the other animations we’ve done though I feel I could have done more with the posing of the whole body as well as just the head, face and arms, especially in the finished pose of the double-take animation, where a more dramatic pose could be pulled with the character leaning back and twisting for example.

[kamlesh06]

CGINTRO Thanks sir Greats 

[sdmilnesjournalba1b]

Today we had our first induction into CG, learning about the Maya work-space and some basic modelling techniques. We started this off by using pre-made shapes and looked at how to individually select vertices, edges or faces and then change these, either moving, rotating or transforming them, to adjust the shape. We also looked at how to divide faces into sections so they can be altered further and how to extrude faces. The above image is the shape I was playing around with, originally a cube but now with various sides rotated, moved, indented and extruded. It took a little while to pick up how things worked but once I’d got used to what to select it was easy to see how this could be used for pretty much anything.

Our second task was a little more complex, involving modelling a cactus. Although it had many more stages the modelling process was the same as with the cube, bringing in default shapes to be altered and put together. We then learnt a little about how to add colour to the models.

Overall it was a good experience and insightful induction into the very basics of how to use Maya. Although what we made wasn’t particularly complex it was easy to see how it could be applied to greater things, the point of an induction, I guess, and I’m looking forward to trying out the animation capabilities of the program.