Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll be going through this week’s lecture, where we got put into groups and had to discuss a question relating to our collaborative project. I’ll then be talking about the process I went through when attempting to create a rig for the 3D model spider that I made last week. Afterwards, I’ll then be speaking about the approach I took when animating the 3D model spider, using the rig I just created, outlining the difficulties I faced during this process. Lastly, I’ll be listing my objectives to complete for the upcoming week.
This Week’s Lecture:
In this week’s lecture, our class was divided up into groups, and we were all given a different question to discuss among ourselves. Each group consisted of members working on separate collaborative projects, meaning we had to explain our projects to others, similar to what we did the week prior. The question for our group was:
“Take another element that you think has been less successful in each of your projects. Is it possible to use these to devise a new piece?”
As I had my collaborative group member in my group for this lecture, Michaela, we quickly discussed this question before discussing it with the rest of the group. We both agreed that the weakest element of our collab project was the narrative. One member in our group also thought the weakest element in their project was the narrative. In contrast, the other two members of our group agreed that the weakest element of their project was the sound. So from here, we asked ourselves what artefact could we create that focuses on the narrative and sound. This was an exciting task to participate in as we’re attempting to take two weak elements and combine them to form one significant artefact.
One idea that came to us was a dance/music video in which the choreographer can use the choreography in the dance to tell a story, giving it a narrative. The sound would require much attention as all dance/music videos heavily rely on sound as it’s an element that could make or break the entire artefact. Another idea that occurred to me was a cinematic title sequence. I’ve watched many title sequences, and the greatest ones are those that explain what the film is based on. Directors and producers could do this through symbolic objects representing an asset that we would see throughout the film. This is an excellent way of explaining the movie’s narrative as it builds anticipation for what’s about to happen within the next couple of hours. The sound is also a crucial element as it sets the film’s tone and controls the audiences’ emotions. Utilising these two elements to perfection can produce a tremendous memorable cinematic title sequence.
3D Spider Rig:
Creating a rig for the 3D model spider wasn’t tricky as I only needed to insert joints within the legs, fangs, and main body. For instance, it’s a lot less complicated than creating a rig for a human character. When I got onto the animation stage, I would be animating the legs more than any other body part. Therefore, I started by creating joints within the legs.
I inserted joints only in one leg to create one completed bone to make my life easier. All of my spider’s legs consist of the same shape as each other, meaning I’m able to duplicate the bone seven times to have eight individual bones, one for each leg.
After duplicating a bone, I still needed to rotate and rescale the bones according to the size of the spider’s legs. Therefore, I only did it for one side, meaning I had four completed bones. I then mirrored the rig, so it symmetrically duplicates those four bones onto the other side of the spider, creating all eight completed bones.
Now that I fully rigged my legs, my next step was to create another rig and insert joints within the fangs and the main body. I would then combine these two rigs to make one whole rig.
Now that I’ve got a completed rig with all joints in place, it was time for me to attach IK handles to the endpoint joints, creating a chain that connects the selected end joint to the start joint.
Next, I connected NURBS circles to each IK handle, matching their translation together. I then parented the IK handles, so they move whenever I move the NURBS circles. This will make it easier for me to animate each body part.
Now that my rig was fully complete with all IK handles in place, I played around with each control within the rig to see if everything would move the way I wanted.
As everything worked the way I intended it to, it was now time for me to begin animating the 3D model spider.
3D Spider Animation:
I was pretty concerned about animating the 3D spider because I thought animating eight legs at once would be very difficult. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure how they move as they’re small, fast creatures. Therefore, I browsed through Youtube for reference videos I could use. However, most videos weren’t helpful due to the camera angle it was filmed out and the type of spider being filmed. Therefore, I searched for 3D model spider reference videos instead. Fortunately for me, I managed to find a video that displayed their 3D spider from three different angles that would benefit me.
The only problem with this reference video was that it would display all three views simultaneously. Ideally, I needed them to show individually rather than share a canvas. Therefore, I decided to take this reference video into Adobe Premiere Pro to try and create three separate videos from this one clip.
To create the three individual videos, I increased the scale of the original clip so that one of the four videos took up the entire canvas.
All I had to do now was change the position and render the clip as an image sequence. I repeated this step three times to get three different rendered videos. Before rendering, I made sure the frame rate was the same as the frame rate I used in Maya, as I was planning to match the model with these reference videos frame by frame. Furthermore, I rendered the clips as images sequence as I needed them to play in Maya.
So now that I had three individual reference clips, I could import each of them as an image sequence in Maya via an image plane. My next step was to scale them up and change their positions to match the 3D spider.
Now that the reference videos were in position, I had to animate the 3D spider. However, as I was syncing my movements to the videos, I chose to keyframe the significant changes rather than set keyframes for every frame. To help, I went into the animation preferences settings and changed the default tangents from Linear to Flat/Stepped. I’d plan to convert these keyframes at the very end.
With the keyframe setting changed now, I began to keyframe all drastic movements, attempting to match the 3D spider with the reference videos as closely as possible. I had some trouble matching the legs with the right legs from the reference video, as there was no outline or anything to differentiate the legs from each other. This occurred a lot when the legs overlapped each other. There was no way of fixing this solution; therefore, at some points, I had to improvise and move the legs according to what I thought looked right.
Once I inserted all the keyframes I needed, I went into the animation graph editor and converted the flat/stepped keyframes into linear ones.
This allowed my 3D model spider to move particular body parts during each keyframe. Now I could fully visualise the spider’s legs and fangs movement.
As I was more than satisfied with the legs and fangs movement. It was now time for me to animate the spider as a whole, making it walk along a path. To do this, all I did was group the spider object with the rig and IK handles and animate the X position, allowing it to walk in a straight path.
Overall, I was proud of the spider’s animation. I next created a playblast to share with my group members to get their thoughts on the animation before moving on to my next task.
Every member of my group was happy with the animation, meaning I was done animating the spider and could move on to the texturing.
Objectives for Next Week:
- Research and learn how to texture using Substance Painter.
- Texture the 3D model spider.
- Re-texture the 3D model bird.