Studio 2 journal entry week: 3 & 4

So the last 2 weeks have predominantly been rigging, however I have also made an animatic, specialisation pitch blog and previs layout. I also fixed the eyes in terms of lattice deforms and I changed the colours of all the bones and nurbs to make it easier to figure out what is what.

Animatic (week 3)

The animatic was based on the Story board I created in week 2, however it also includes the audio I have chosen to use.

Modelling Note:

To create Lattice warpped eyes - Create a Sphere and adjust the orientation to make the centre point facing the front. Duplicate the sphere and make it slightly larger. Select half of the faces and extract them to make 2 separate objects. select all 3 objects and press Deform, Lattice. (again make sure the sphere is in the correct place first before applying the lattice). Adjust the lattice (not the object) to make the eye shape you want. Now when you select the eye mesh or the eyelids, they should move to fit the deform constrain.

Oh my goodness.... Riggin is a pain. The actual process itself isnt too hard, and in fact I quite enjoyed it, however I had hours of problems when parent constraining the controls to the bones (Nurbs to bones in Maya2018). I tried everything, from parenting, parent contrains, point constrains, orient constrains, parenting to the nurbs, parenting the the joints, changing the hierarchy, Grouping the nurbs, not grouping the nurbs, changing the joint rotation axis, freeze transforming... etc, etc.... I watched multiple tutorials, googled to try and find answers and asked for help from a lecturer, but no luck.

This is my model, outliner and rig without any parenting or constraints

Finally another lecturer came in and saved the day. And I realised that I hadn't parented the Nurbs to each other.......... duh. I knew it was something small an simple that was preventing it from working.

Anyway, after that dilemma my eye lattice's disappeared, and so I had to redo the eyes again.

This is the Eyes with their lattices and the outliner

But I think that these eyes have been my favourite ones so far so that's good.

I then finally FINISHED RIGGING yay!!! I am very happy on how it turned out, and now after so much trial and error, I feel quite confident with rigging which is good.

After rigging, I began skinning. I watched a few tutorials to help me remember how to skin as it has been a while, and so the skinning process did not take very long at all. For me the easiest way to skin was to make ultimatums with the influences by assigning very strict part of the body to the bones. After everything was either white or black (in maya colour terms), I then smoothed out all the influences to create a flowing skin so to speak. Then aster putting the character into a few drastic positions, I tweaked the influences as needed.

After all this was done I created the sparse environment which simply consisted of 3 walls and a floor.

That's all for this week!