Maya: Character Pose Sneak Preview

I haven't posted anything in ages!

Well, over the past few weeks I have been skinning characters for the narrative project. It seems like everyday we have to re schedule because we cant keep up with a days work. Anyway, we are now at a stage where we have seven rigs, and I have just merged some of them with the skinned spaceman. I posed him, sitting down taking a rest while adjusting his battery pack thingy.



As soon as all the characters rigs are combined with the skinned files, I will post some videos on everything working.
Ruben is busy with creating the environments while Shahbir will be doing the characters facial rigging (excluding spaceman), while I will begin preparing and organising stuff for animation, and then animating.

Right now I am combining the rigs with the skin on all the characters. This is getting very monotonous, with all the joints that need parenting.
Here's another character.


A Flock of Pixels

Maya: General's Office Modelled

Firstly taking on blocked out General's Office done by my Studio Colleague Shahbir, I added more objects, such as the lamp, the phone, and the chair. With everything modelled I began UV Map it and now the overall set is in a stage where It can get to the animation.

Today, I have also started to model the interior of the Spacestation, which will be uploaded when finished.

Maya: General Muscles

Deciding that only the male characters will have muscle, I just had to add to the general, being a character with a certain age, i have added less muscle visibility, and no jiggle.

General Muscles Both Arms  

Maya: Soldier Muscles

After getting all the skinning done for my 4 characters I added some smaller tweaks, such as muscle and jiggles, this was used to create a more convincing model where the animation will look more accurate to of a real person.


Soldier Muscles- Wire

Soldier Muscles- Smooth

Soldier Muscles Both Arms

Maya: Generic Female Basic Skinning

Here is the Ruben! with an update on the skinning process of our characters, at this stage skinning is pretty much done in my characters and with Ethan's ones, just needs some tweaking by adding muscle, and maybe jiggles.

The generic female was my last character to skin, and maybe the trickiest one because of the skirt and the hair are complex geometries, other than that everything went all right. As far  Rigging goes, I was informed it was a bit off schedule but Shahbir is catching up with it. when these 2 processes are done, Rigging and Skinning we can start animate, the movements of the characters, however facial rigging still needs to be done in order to make dialogues for the trailer.

Skinning: Generic Female Head and Torso

Skinning: Generic Female Hand

Skinning: Generic Female Legs

 

Maya: Assistant Basic Skinning

Continuing on the Skinning task, the next character to be skinned was the assistant, which happens to be a character I have also modelled. Being the first female character to be skinned it was quite tricky at some points, but nothing some patience wont solve.

Assistant Head Skinning

Assistant Torso Skinning

Assistant Hand Skinning

Also according to Ethan to better pose the character, I have also added a basic binding onto the legs and shoes, just so the character will pose more convincingly even though no rig needs to be done. 

Assistant Legs Skinning (No Rig) 

Maya: General Basic Skinning

here is Ruben in his Skinning quest! ( doesn't it sound wrong, never mind!)

After getting the soldier up for the final touches of skinning I decided to take on the General and add the basic skinning, bind the skin and tweak the weights. 

Although for this character I bound the overall mesh, only the upper body was tweaked, as he will move and be seen from the pelvis upwards.  

Now the only things to add are the muscles and some jiggle (if needed). 

General- Hand Skinning

General- Torso Skinning

General- Head Skinning

EDIT**

Once again for the purpose to pose the character more convincingly, I skinned the legs of the General

General- Legs Skinning

Now onto the next 2 characters !

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-       

Maya: Soldier Rig Complete

Finally finished rigging the Soldier character, it was long and hard but I was able to do it in the end. However while rigging the model I notice that the hand of the Soldier is placed wrong, it is slightly off center of the hand mesh, I need to talk to Ethan about it but other than that the rig is perfect. All that's left is to skin the bones to the mesh.

Maya: Character Skeletons

While I've been busy finishing off my three characters UV maps, I have also been placing the joints too.
It's taken quite some tweaking.

The soldier


The Scientist


The Spaceman


Shahbir has been busy too. Finishing off the modeling. Officially this weeks schedule had Shahbir rigging while Ruben and I skinned the characters.
So to speed things along I've asked them to send their completed models to me to be UV mapped and to place the joints. Since that's what I've been doing all week, I've had the most practice. We all agreed that it would be a good idea if I continue to do that with everyone else's characters. It also gives me a chance to check over the models in more detail.
I have checked over Shahbirs Generic Male character.
There were a couple of minor alterations. Nothing to do with the shape, but just how clean it was. The main alteration was that I added more edge loops in the bottom half of the coat. It was necessary so there would be enough detail for it to deform.



Shahbir has at the moment begun rigging the soldier. This is going to be a sort of test run to see how long it takes and if there are any problems with the rig, so that we can better schedule and organise when the rest of the characters will be rigged and to what level of detail.

Maya: Assistant Final Model

Last couple of days, I have been working on modelling the assistant's face. as it shows on my previous post. from that point I had to tweak some of the features and create the hair for her.

And so we arrive at the stage where she is ready for rigging/ skinning and texturing. however first she will need a UV layout treatment. 

Wireframes ( Not Smooth)

Wireframes (Smooth)

Maya: Assistant Face Modelling Progress

After the final tweaks on the Assistant's body, I took the next step of modelling her face.
The first stage was to do the eye and the mouth.

1st Stage- Eye and Mouth Modelling 

Wireframe                             Smooth Model

 

2nd Stage- Nose Modelling

Wireframe (not Smooth)

Wireframe (Smooth)

And here is the model as it is now, where I added the ears and the neck, but also tweak some of cheek and the top of the head.

Smooth

Wireframe

Now it's time to give her some hair and then connect her with the finished and already scaled to animation proportion scale.

EDIT: Here is the character after the tweak the lips and cheeks.

Maya: Generic Male 90% done

Today I have finished most of my Generic male. As mentioned before today I was going to finish making the head and I did. I shaped out his eye lids, nose, mouth and ears. I added hair on him as well some eyebrows,. The last thing to make is his hands.
Front




Back




Head



Please leave feedback if he needs any improvments.

Maya: Generic Male body Finished, Head in Progress

Today I finished tweaking the Generic Male's body, I made his coat more baggy so it looks more like a trench coat. Also I have built some pockets on the bottom half of the coat so it won't look like a separate piece. I have also added a T-shirt to show what he is wearing underneath his jacket, which didn't took too long to make.

Front




Back




Once I have finished making final touched on the Generic Males body I then began in making his head, so far I have only make the basic shape soon I will make the finish piece.
Head




Leave some feedback it you fell there are some improvements that are needed.

Maya: Assistant Body Modeling Progress IV

So continuing to model the female character, finished the legs, shoes and added the extra details, the only thing need is the head which I will be concentrating from this time onwards. I also tweaked the leg proportions.

Wireframe ( Not Smooth)

Wireframe (Smooth)