cameras

For this topic I had to research the 3 main types of cameras such as why there are different and how I can use them. The tools I used for this was the cameras under create, translate and rotate tools. One part I liked about this topic was finding out that each camera would work best in different types of scenes, however one part I did not like is that later on there can be problems attaching/constrain to motion paths the cameras to NURBS curves. I will use these camera to show my character turnaround and later for my main scenes that I will animate my character for.

In Maya there are 3 main types of cameras, the first is a basic camera what shows what it is pointed at, the second is camera and aim, this camera has a point that focuses the camera at it so if the camera is moved it will always face the pointer, finally the third is camera aim and up, this is the same as camera and aim but the camera can be rotated with a second pointer.

lights

For this topic I was asked to explore the different types of lights in maya and to use the 3 point light set up. The tools I used was the lights under create, translate, rotate and scale tools. One part I like about using the lights is changing the settings to create different types of light sources and colours, so for example you can create the effect of a sunset, however one part I disliked is recalling all the settings for the 3 point light set up. I will use the lights to set up the lighting in my final character file so you can see how my character looks from different perspective and how the bones looks through the translucent skin. My favourite part was see how my character looks in different types of lights.

In Maya there are several types of light, on of which is ambient that emits an equal amount in every direction in the scene this is useful for an outside scene.

Another type of light is spotlight that creates a cone of light from its source.

The third light is area light that is very intense and gives the illusion of light coming through a window or reflecting off a mirror.

Another type of light in Maya is directional light, and this is used for 3 point lighting, it emits light from every direction it is facing.

textures

For this task was asked to find out what each of the 3 main textures looked like and what i ca do with them. In this task the tools that I used was he select tool and the texture tools. One part I disliked about the texture tools is that if you don’t name your textures it can be annoying recalling which is which, however an aspect that I like about the texture tools is the range of effects you can create and because of this I can create multiple parts for my character, such as a body and skeleton, and texture them differently, so I can have a translucent body with solid bones. My favourite part of this topic was exploring all the possibilities that can be done with the texture tools.

In Maya there are 3 main textures that are Blinn, Lambert and Phong, Lambert is mat texture, however Blinn is very glossy and phong is slightly less glossy than Blinn, within hypershade you can change the properties of each texture, such as colour, transparency, ambient colour and so on, to apply a texture after its been made you can right click and hold and go down to apply existing material, from there you can select what texture you need for that object, you can also select a single or multiple faces and apply a texture that way so you can have multiple textures on a single object.

Sculpting tools.

The sculpting tools are a set of tools that work best with more vertexes, each tool has a different effect for example the imprint tool works with a image that you can change, the lighter areas of the image will have more of an effect than the darker areas, you can change the area of effect by pressing the left mouse button and dragging and when you let go parts of the object will be dragged out more than the rest due to the light and dark areas of the image, however another tool is the smooth tool which brings the vertexes together to smooth the object, in total there are 18 different tools, witch each tool you can change the ‘brush size’, strength and even invert its effect, for example the grab tool would normally grab the vertexes and drag them around however if inverted it would push them in the opposite direction. Furthermore the last tool is the freeze tool which allows you to ‘paint’ on the vertexes and negates the effects of the other sculpting tools and is only active when any sculpting tool is active, but will ‘switch off’ when a different type of tool is selected e.g. translate tool.

From when I used the sculpting tools I found it difficult to use and control, however with experience it is possible to create many textures and interesting designs with these tools, and due to my characters design I will not be using the sculpting tools for it because of its angular design I will only need to move the vertexes.

Quad draw

This technique is the Quad draw technique, this involves creating a high poly object base that will be used to create a low poly object for the character. The main tools that I used for this are; select, translate, scale, rotate, edge loop, and quad draw tool. One part that I liked is that you can use a high poly object to create a low poly object that is similar to the original high poly object, however on part I did not like was the initial difficulty of the quad draw tool at first, for example it can be difficult to see what you have drawn at times and that number of polys need to be the same and the rest of your main character e.g. 8 polys on top of the leg and 8 polys on where the leg connects to the body. Due to my character being very angular and not that anatomical I will not be using this technique for my final model.

For the quad draw I am going to create a leg for an example, first I create a cylinder from the polygon primitives section under create, I then switch the perspective to front view and align the centre of the object to line-up with the knee and after I reduce the radius to match the size of the knee and increase the height to go from the top of the leg to the ankle then finally change the subdivisions height to 2, because of aligning the centre of cylinder to the knee the new subdivision will be across the knee.

to help get the shape of the leg I will add edge loops either side of the knee to create the knee and I will also add some to other parts of the leg to be able to shape the leg, to create the shape I will press and hold the right mouse button over the object and select vertex, I will then press E and select the new vertices and rotate them to suit the shape of the leg, I will also use R to scale them to the correct size, I will also keep switching between front and side view to efficiently create the leg shape. This is the base for what I will then quad draw on to create the actual leg.

To accesses the quad draw tool I open up the modelling tool kit which is a button in the top right corner of the screen that looks like a hammer and a cube with 4 faces on one side, at the bottom of the new tab will be the quad draw tool, but to use this I must first smooth the leg by selecting the leg in object mode and then going to mesh and selecting smooth and after I must press the magnet button to make the object ‘live’ now I can use the quad draw tool, this involves left clicking to select 4 points then shift-left click in the middle to create a new polygon, I do this all across the leg making sure that on the top and bottom I have the same number of quads as I do on the rest of my model so that I can attach it to the rest of my model later, I will also refer to anatomy models to help make the leg look realistic i.e. by following the curve of the Sartorius.

After I go back to object mode and select the leg I then press Q and move the leg to one side I now have the high poly leg and a low poly leg, next I undo make live and reposition the vertexes again to get the correct shape on the low poly leg.

To fix the leg to the body I first select the torso then shift click the leg, I then go to mesh and combine, this will combine the to objects into one, also if I duplicated a part of an object it will disappear but I can reduplicate the object with the leg attached later, I then delete the faces of the torso that would then match up with the leg and delete them, this is so I can then bridge the edges of the torso and leg together.

Extrusion modelling

The next technique is extrusion modelling, this involves pulling the faces out of the character. the main tools that I used for this were select, translate, rotate, scale, extrude, edge loop. One part I like about this technique is the usefulness of the extrude tool to create new parts of an object to model from however a part I dislike of this was using this method to create muscles because in my option I can struggle with anatomy. I can use this technique to help create a majority of the parts for my character, such as parts of the arms/legs and the hands/fingers.

First I rearrange the vertexes to get a rough shape for what I need, after I select face from the right click menu, after I select the faces I would like to pull out of the object, after I go to edit mesh>extrude or control+E, I then use the local/world switch, that sort of looks like a power button, to change the extrude mode to world, this will keep what I extrude the same shape as the faces if I left on local mode then when extruded the new faces will be distorted as they will follow the angel of the original faces, I then used the arrows on the extrude tool to pull out the arm to the elbow and repeat to create the elbow, forearm and the wrist, to get a flat edge on the face you extrude you can use the scale tool, or R, and drag the red square to the centre.

To make the model more realistic I added more edge loops to extrude the muscles in the arm, I can do this by adding an edge loop in the middle of the arm and rotating it to get a Z shape, I then use the translate tool to move it closer to the elbow, you can also switch to vertex mode to get more accurate placement for the points you need, by using the vertexes you can easily manipulate the placement and rotation the areas for the key muscle groups of the arm.

after I then add more edge loops so I can extrude some of the faces for the muscles of arm.

with the extrusion tool I can not only choose where it extrudes to but also the scale of the selected faces.

I then repeat this process to crate the other muscles of the arm.

After making the muscles you can smooth the object, shortcut is the number 3, to see how they look in a more organic way, here is a screenshot showing the difference of making the muscles and not making the muscles.

Box modelling

For this task I will create a torso using one of the sculpting methods known as box modelling. The main tools that I used for this were; select, translate, scale, edge loop. One part of this technique that I like was the its easy to control and edit however one part that I didn’t like was the symmetry settings because a mistake can be annoying to fix. I can use this technique to create a majority of my character due to the angular design. My favourite part of box modelling is how easy it is to control and edit.

First I create a cube from create>polygon primitives and change the the height, width and depth to 3 and subdivisions to 4 and press W to bring up the translation tool, I then reposition the cube to where the torso would be.

I then bring up the cubes menu by right click and hold and select vertex, I can then select points individually or left click and drag to select multiple points, I then reposition the points to get a similar shape to the torso, if needs be I can add more edges and vertex’s with the edge loop tool which is under mesh tools, to help with symmetry you can bring up the objects menu and select faces, then select half of the cube and delete, after you go to edit>duplicate special and click the cube next to duplicate special, in the settings make sure instance is checked and scale is set at -1 for all values, next click duplicate then go to tool settings and turn symmetry X on.

After I then round out the shape to make it look more organic, a useful tool can be the scale tool (R) or the translate tool ( W ) can also be used to edit single or multiple points on a certain part of the torso, first i select the vertexes that needs editing and use the scale tool to change the distance between the points.

Creating backgrounds for front and side view of character

For this task I will use the front and side views of the character to use as a reference while making my character. Initially the front and side views can be hand drawn or created in photoshop but will then be imported into Maya after resizing/realigning in photoshop, the main tools that I can use for this are; translate, scale, rotate. If I could do this differently I would add a colour samples that I used for my character so later on during texturing I will have them as notes to use. By creating these background images I can then use them to get the correct scale, shape and depth for my character. An example of the front and side views for a character was in my character model sheet research that shows a robot design which shows the size, shapes and depth of the character.

First I go to create>polygon primitives>plane then change the height and width to 24 and subdivisions to 1. After you need to rotate the plane 90° on the X axis, next you need to translate the object 12 units on the Y axis and -12 on the Z axis, after I duplicated the object with control+D and needed to change the rotation 90° again Y axis and translate the object -12 on the X axis and reset the Z axis to 0. I then changed go to panels>orthographic>front, I then right click and hold on the object to bring up its menu, I assign a new material and select Lambert, in the attribute editor I find the lambert tab i just created and then I click the checkered box next to colour and select PSD file and select the front view for the character, I then change the perspective to side and repeat this for the side view of the character.

Useful keys in maya

Q – select tool

W – translate tool

E – rotate tool

R – scale tool

Y – selects the last tool used

Hold X – snaps to grid

Hold V – snaps to points

ALT+left mouse button – look around the scene

ALT+right mouse button – zoom

ALT+click wheel button – pan around scene