NMD201 (2010)
The next step to the future!
Maya Scenes
Posted by Richard in May 28, 2010, under Projects
Here are the Maya Binary scenes that make up what my final animation was going to be. Between them, they demonstrate a lot of the stuff we learned in class.
The final animation was supposed to combine parts of all three of these scenes, however due to problems I had with animating, I couldn’t do so.
Basically the desktop is the scene, which the worm would crawl in from the right, at which point the bouncing ball would come across from the left which the worm’s eyes would follow.
The two issues I had were getting the eyeballs to move with the blendshape movements of the worm, and converting the blendshape animations for use in the Trax Editor so I wouldn’t have to redo repeated animation over and over.
Desktop Space v2
Posted by Richard in May 28, 2010, under Projects
My final animation was going to use this scene and have a little animation happening in it however I’ve had troubles with the animation in question which I will talk about in a bit. I’ve added a lead pencil to the scene.
I also made a little worm character which was going to crawl along the table and then watch a bouncing ball heading back the other way, however I couldn’t figure out how to create tracks for the Trax Editor using blendshape keyframes. My worm is animated using blend shapes as I found the rigging was not fine-tuned enough to adequately perform what I wanted to do with it, with my current level of skill. The other problem was getting the eyes to move in sync with the blendshape animation as they seemed to operate separately regardless of any contraints I put on them. My worm did have 4 separate animations including raising his head, and looking left and right, however only his crawl animation is shown in this video.
Desktop Space
Posted by Richard in May 25, 2010, under Experiments
Some more experimentation with some of the features in Maya. The basket and the table top use the built in texture creator, though its probably not that apparent in these low quality videos. The lamp is essentially the centerpiece, which is my first attempt at combining a light source into an object, I found however that I also needed a global light source in order to make the scene light enough to see things. The flickering is done using an expression that randomly changes the intensity of the light source at a random interval.
Week 12 “Brief”
Posted by Richard in May 24, 2010, under Weekly Tasks
Here’s the animation I did for the “brief” test we did in week 12. The plane flies around the flag and zooms past the camera. I chose to finish early and work on my final animation rather than do more on this one.
Richard
Follow the Bouncing Ball
Posted by Richard in May 18, 2010, under Experiments
I think I understand the difference between Dynamics and nDynamics now. Dynamics is sort of action based, whereas nDynamics sort of have a mind of their own and generally try to emulate very natural effects such as water or cloth.
By simply swapping over to Dynamics my animation which had the eye follow the ball works much better, and no key frames are required at all!
This scene is made up of a floor, the eye which is Constraint-Aimed by the ball, which has gravity and air blowing from the left attached to it. Tribute to Luxo and Luxo Jr!!
Ball In A Box
Posted by Richard in May 18, 2010, under Experiments
Another idea I had which turned out to work better with Dynamics as opposed to nDynamics was a bouncy ball in a box. A few issues here, for starters the Dynamics passive attaches to the outer side of a surface thus in order to make it in reverse, I had to make 4 planes and rotate them inwards and then emerge them into a cube. Obviously there’s a much simpler and better way of doing it, but I just wanted to get the effect working. The second problem is that by setting the bounciness to a progressive increment, the ball will reach a speed where it will pass through the cube, effectively ending the animation. I couldn’t find any thickness properties to play with so I chose to stop the animation right before this problem occurs.
The built in physics engine provides an endless supply of possibilities of cool things that could be done, such as a complex chain effect such was performed in the 1990 game series “The Incredible Machine”. Eventually I’d like to make a scene like that 
Seesaw
Posted by Richard in May 18, 2010, under Experiments
Looked at another tutorial which was about the “Dynamics” tools and setting up a simple seesaw playground in Maya.
Something I noticed was that the bounciness of say a ball had a much more significant effect when using Dynamics as opposed to nDynamics. Now I’m just happy that I get to play with a built in physics engine so I’m not too fussed to know why that is.
I also discovered that rendering with motion blur can have an impact on the physics engine as my blue ball actually passed right through the board with motion blur turned on, weird but true.
Eyeball
Posted by Richard in May 17, 2010, under Experiments
Having a bit of play at combining several elements into one animation…
The eye is actually meant to follow the ball but I can’t seem to set the “Contrain-Aim” properly to do this automatically so I just keyframed it based on the position of the ball at certain key points.
Will figure this out eventually.
Sisters Cartoon Owl
Posted by Richard in May 16, 2010, under Uncategorized
I’ve been slowly working on my first character model in Maya and I’ve been trying to do up a little cartoon owl my sister made up for a children’s book she was making for her English class this semester.
It’s not very good yet, but I’m learning and getting use to Maya the more I work on it…
Toons
Posted by Richard in May 10, 2010, under Uncategorized
Experimenting with the toon effects.
