Maya - @ Alan - Blend Shapes

Hey Alan. I had a go myself at fixing the blend shapes. It took a taxi journey home to fully understand what you said! I think I got it anyway.

Am I right in thinking that this was something we kind of done in a tutorial last year?

Here's a video demonstration of what it's like before and after.


Anyway, what I did was rotated the arm half way between it's extreme pose and default pose so that the original blend shape was at it's mid point, where the geometry was penetrating the arm.

I then duplicated it twice (the left meshes). I then made the correction on one of them. That became the positive blend shape, and the other, the negative blend shape.

with the original blend shape still connected to the arm, I added the new 'parallel' blend shape. Made the negative, minus one and the positive, plus one. This added the correction to the blend.

I then positioned the arm back to the extreme pose and duplicated it. This gave me the corrected blend shape.

So assuming I've done that right, does this new shape become the one singular blend shape for that particular arm movement? It seems to work better now so I assume this is the right way to fix it. Please give some feedback, if this is what you mean.

Thanks

Maya: Soldier Basic Skinning

Firstly, I will have to say that most of the progress from now on will be posted in videos as we begin to step into the realms of animation.

So after getting the models ready for the animation, my task laid in doing the skinning, which is a crucial process to get convincing  animation, by creating muscles on a character or avoid the geometry to collide with itself. 

I can say here is the skinning for the soldier until certain extent where only the arms and legs muscles will be added, to create a rather more convincing motion in the character. Also the last thing to add will be the some jiggle deformers around the sleeves. This process will be carefully monitored when to render as the cache needs to be loaded just before the rendering starts.


Soldier Skinning- Arms & Hands

Soldier Skinning- Legs & Shoes

Soldier Skinning- Head

Administration: Skinning Tasks

Today, Me and Ethan decided which characters each another will be Skinning.
In order to remember us this post will be up.

Skinning Tasks

Ruben


-Assistant
-Soldier
-Generic Female
- General


Ethan

-Spaceman
-Scientist
-Generic Male


As you see Ethan as less one character as he after skin the 3 characters will help Shahbir with the facial rigging and blend shapes.


So let's it begin!!!

Maya: All Seven Characters Fully Modelled, Scaled, UVmapped and All Joints Placed

That was a mouthful!




Just to be clear, they were not all modeled by me. It's been a team effort to get all the characters at the place they are today. I volunteered to finish off the characters UV maps and placing the joints. While Shahbir volunteered to do all the rigging and has been busy testing first on the soldier. I'm sure Shahbir can fill you in on all the details with rigging. In the week ahead Ruben and I will be skinning, while Shahbir does the rigging.

Spaceman


Soldier


General


Generic Female


Generic Male


Assistant


Scientist


So we are all going to be busy next week!

A Flock of Pixels

Maya: Generic Female Final Model

After getting other projects out of the way I concentrate on creating the rest of the generic female character, having done the body the only thing missing was the head. So based on the ortographs I created the head for the character and with this the character modelling task is done now it is time for the rest, Rigging and Skinning here we go.

Generic Female Close-up

Generic Female -Smooth

 Wireframes

Not Smooth

Smooth

Maya: Soldier Arm Rig Complete

Yesterday me and Ethan were trying out a new rig for the arms of our characters, we think this will make animating our characters quite easy because the arms are using IK controls. The rig has some similarities with the old arm rig, mostly the clav and the wrist, but everything else is different. The arm can bend much easily and the hands can stay in their position while we are moving the body of the rig.

Administration: New Timetable for the Next 6 Weeks

Hello guys, here is an important anouncement:
In this post is the timetable for the next 6 weeks, where we will attempt to reach the final stage of our animation trailer. However, I hate to be the one saying this but due to one of our members be away from doing project work for a couple of weeks and where he failed to complete the task given to him last week. we had a meeting and decided to redo the timetable with only 3 members, this doesnt mean he is excluded however the project management and administration of the project are skeptical if he will do anything, though if this is proven wrong, we will quickly give him some work to do.

If any of the members got any questions just ask!

So here is the timetable for the next 6 weeks, where B3D Studios, have to work 100% or even more to achieve the animation at the studios standards, So I wish you all good luck and a Merry Christmas! !


 

Legend:

Shahbir-     
Ethan-        
Ruben-       
Ethan & Ruben-