The VFX Module.

V F X

Recently we've been briefed for a Visual Effects (I think) which involves the cohesion of maya and film. Ive got to say i would have been happier had it all been about film but its going to be interesting seeing how the two combine to create some of the visually fantastic films we see today. Its not going to be the same standard as Inception or anything but the basic principals are still the same.

Our task is to create a pre-set visual effects short film which is based on a pre determined storyboard. The storyboard dictates that theres an alien invasion and 4 specific shots that are needed by it.

1         A shot of the space craft flying over/between tall buildings

2        One of people running and screaming away from it

3        A close up of a photographer before she gets abducted/beamed up by the craft

4        Finally is the shot we are to design ourselves, i liked the inclusion of this as it allows some                                

          creativity on my part. From the videos of the previous years videos they show the interior of the

          craft which would allow me to design it in Maya.



Ive thought about the design of the space craft first as it is in the opening sketch but i also think designing the space ships interior at the same time would also be a good idea because getting all the maya modelling done first would allow a lot of time for post production on after effects. I also can't use after effects yet as i don't know how and i can get a lot of designing and modelling done over christmas.

Standard spaceship. Not a fan looks to
flat and not enough detail on the hull
or with the colours used

An Interesting shape, pulling away from what they should look like
 but aside from that it just looks like a blob. 

I found designs such as these from a google image search and just shows how we've come a long way from imagining all alien space ships to be saucer shaped.

Awesome design for a pirate space ship. Looks rustic yet futuristic.

After looking at these spaceships I decided that it doesn't have to be a big scary malicious death machine but could be a normal house hold or everyday item that i've converted into a spaceship. I thought this would give me more room to be creative rather than be narrowed to the classic spaceship characteristics.

.E V A L U A T I O N.

Overall I feel that i learnt a lot from this project and did things I had no idea to do before september. Building a biped model, drawing it out then taking it into Maya as reference and then bringing him to life with controls and textures etc.

The good thing is I know how to do all of this, the bad thing is that the model went disastrously disastrously wrong near the end. This was because some of the vertices were trying to return to the origin which turned out to be caused by faces within faces which caused this bug. This really irritated me for no other reason than I thought i had accomplished so much and it was all a waste. However i did learn about all the things i still did and i have learned from my mistakes which i can improve on in the next module.

Despite the disaster at the end i really enjoyed this module as it was interesting to learn about all the different techniques of animation and modelling. I learnt the value of the extrusion and combine tool and also learnt how to Cylindrical map my robot character. I liked being able to be creative in a group and I really liked our idea for the cinematic. This being said time management needs to be improved and I know i've said that before but theres no more leaving things to the last minute. Mostly because I want to know that theres some overlap time to alter errors and touch it up in post production.

Even though I did pretty well in the modelling side there are still areas I need to improve on, such as, edge flow. I need to make sure the faces and edges of the model flow in a sensible way so it makes it much easier to constrain and weight paint. The other areas are the constraining, this irritated me massively as nothing i seemed to do was right no matter how closely i followed the video guides. The most important thing iv'e learnt (besides the skills involved) is to take a lot of care when modelling as the tiniest slip up could cause massive problems down the line. This is heavily linked to edge flow as the edges of my initial alien weren't very good which was why I had to restart it multiple times. Even though I had to restart the alien many times which was incredibly annoying i learnt something new I'd done wrong every time which made making my model a lot easier having learnt from these mistakes.

However this isn't really over, as next week we have an offsite exhibition in which we are displaying our work to the public. Now as a piece at the moment it could not be shown there but over the next week or so I plan on re designing the robot from scratch, drawing to animating, to make our piece a lot more professional with clean clear animation.

Anatomy of the Human Body.

The best way to think about rigging and animating is to compare your rig directly to the movements, actions and capabilities of the actual human body. The character you make may not be human or even alive but the bi-ped/humanoid shape of it, like my robot and the alien, means that the rig still has to move in certain ways.

For example you can't bend your elbow past 90 degrees otherwise it'll break. This goes the same for the alien and the robot. This wouldn't necessarily apply to all robots but if there was no structure to their skeleton their arms and legs would move all over the shop.

This isn't exactly medical journal standard of explaining but the point is that in animation you have to learn the rules to the way bodies move and how physics affects them, before you can break them and start exaggerating and changing them.

Its also worth noting that despite its humanoid shape my robot is very different in terms of how it works. The muscles in the human body expand or contract to do different jobs, the robot doesn't do this as it has no muscles so relies on its mechanical grip. The robot also stands perfectly upright and is perfectly balanced unlike humans who rely on fluid in their ears to maintain a sense of balance. You can also see about that the human knee if, if you followed it directly down, reaches the start of the toes where as my robot its knee is perfectly in line with its ankle. This explains that people are more nimble due to their ability to move quickly in different directions. The robot would be more sluggish in this way and i hope to capture this in the animation. 

Building the Controls for the Rig.

The next step was to start making the controls for the rig. This will enable me to move the different appendages of the model in a smooth fashion. The making of the controls was simple enough as we just use nurb primitives (circles,lines,curves) to create the controls. The process was simple but very time consuming when you don't initially know how to do it. Its also not the most fun process as modelling as its just moving circles into their correct places.

Geometry with the controls. The circles repesent rotating parts and arrows (master
controller) for moving 

The colours represent left and right: Blue is left, red is right and yellow
is everything else

(Unrelated Maya Adventures)

Whilst designing the robot i decided to try and make some other robots from across films/tvshows. I first decided to model r2d2 from star wars. This was a much simpler endeavour than i first envisioned as all it required was a few polygons and lots of extruding. It worked out really well i think and the gold colour was the transformation from R2 to OG-D2.

I also decided to model Bender from Futurama as a bit more of a challenge, it turned out to be as much of a challenge is id thought. Turning a primarily 2d character into a 3d one poses some aesthetic issues as we are not  used to seeing Bender this way. The head was the hardest due to the visor and mouth. but after a lot of tweaking and moving vertices.

I used a shiny texture initially but it didn't look as good as when i tried a matte finish. Most likely because he doesn't have a shiny skin in the programme. Which makes me realise that the finish on a colour whether it be shiny, matte, glossy, pearlescent etc it makes a big difference to the final look of the model 

UV Mapping

Today I found out that my robot character needed to be cylindrically mapped, and until i learn how to do this Iv'e got some examples of some UV and Bump mapped textures which i'm hoping to use with the cylindrical mapping.

Rigging the Robot,

Next its on to building the joint chains and making the rig, which will be used to animate the character. I found this surprisingly easy for most of the time as making joint chains is a very logical process. It also helps, i think, to remember how the human bodies joints work, elbow controls forearm hand, wrist only controls hand. Simple Hierarchy.

The Rig.

The hip dislocate joint had to be parented to the legs so the
chain links up.

The heels of my character are slightly raised off the ground
this is because the ankles of the robot are not the same as human ones
and need to be rigged accordingly.

I found parenting the collarbones to the spine and arms most challenging as
Maya didnt seem to like it when i parented one side as it then unparented the other
After a bit of tweaking i managed to link the rig and realised i was parenting the
wrong way.

Finished Robot & Broken Model.

The screen shots I took below show the final colours I decided on, although final doesn't necessarily mean it'll end up in the movie. I found a carbon fibre texture on the internet and its flowing lines and glossy black finish made it perfect for the robot's head, torso, pelvis, calves and feet. 

I used a metal texture for the neck and wires between the arms to distinguish between the two so there is an obvious difference in material to the rest of the robot.

I used red eyes because of the classic emotions of danger and fear invoked by the colour.

For the environment we have also been asked to create assets for the environment, to make it seem more realistic. So i decided that i would have a broken version of the robot laying crumpled in a heap at the side of the tunnel. I thought this would be a good idea because it implies that some sort of struggle has gone on between the robots and our hero. Leaving it just as the single robot could, again, imply a war but in which see the robots taking no casualties. 

I have also noticed that the robot could be mistaken for an alien in terms of how it looks. The dead and broken robot shows this due to the cracks and dents where as an alien would just have flesh wounds. The robot is also showing no attachment to the dead one showing it as a machine not an organism.

I first imagined making a broken version of the robot might be quite difficult but by deleting parts of it and pulling in faces and vertices I can create a very effective look of destruction. I was particularly impressed with the dents in the torso which look excellent and were so easy to do.

Robot T_Pose Modifications.

After colouring the robot I gave him a second look and realised that he wasn't as detailed as i originally envisioned. So i added some modifications to combat this

Shoulder pads. made to look like armour

Again, made to look like armour

extra 'support' for the legs, and also to make the robot look more ready for action

Torso brace? Again for aesthetics and to stop him snapping in half 

More Variations on Colour.

The designs below are some experiments with colour beyond the silver, black and yellow. 

I experimented with using non block colours to see if stripes made the model stand out as its own but after looking at I think block colours work better. However Uv mapping a design onto the model might be the way forward as I can draw a more intricate design and apply it to the model which would work better than the stripes.

This was my attempt to turn him into a 'Law Bringing' robot so to speak, by using police like colours like black, gold and dark blue. However the blue doesn't really fit and i think bump mapping a police uniform texture might be the way forward if thats the way i go.

This is my favourite one as the pure white body and blood red eyes make for an ominous combination. Also the contrast between his light skin and the dark environment suggests the robot is not from here and that he is an invader of where ever we are in this dark tunnel. His white skin will allow him to show up a lot more against the dark tunnel walls and low lighting.

Testing Colours on the T_Pose.

Before attempting to UV/Cylindrical map I decided to use some basic colours on the robot to demonstrate the kind of colours I would be using. 

I chose silver and black initially because of the classic shiny robot image we see in so many films. The yellow eyes were to make the character seem more sinister. The black is to distinguish between the shiny chassis of the machine to the wires and working parts.

Colouring the robot all in black to see if it looked scarier, which it does. However our scene involves being inside in a dark tunnel like place so him being black might make him too difficult to see against the backdrop of the environment.

The Modelling of the Robot in Maya

Modelling the robot was actually quite fun but also challenging in places. Creating the robot from a sketch to screen was a fulfilling accomplishment and i've also learned even more about Maya in the process. The extrude tool became a vital part of my arsenal to create the character as i used faces on the body to make the arms and legs instead of making each one a separate object.

I have also made some alterations to the design such as removing the small extra wires on the elbow area. The head is also a different shape as the modelled one, the one in the model is elongated at the bottom to give it a more human shaped face.

 These two images (of the feet) Are another alteration I made to its initial design. I used the same principal as the neck to create these but also took inspiration from the blades the paraolympian athletes run on as well.

The image below shows another one of the changes I made. I tried making the neck from the base of the sphere but it kept looking wrong and out of place, then I had the idea to make a funkier neck as opposed to the norm. I think it came across pretty well as the neck line is a lot smoother. 

 The legs were, again, straightforward to make. I used the same techniques as the arms but probably better.

The next job is to colour the robot. I will first do this with the hypershade tool to give simple colours to show how it would look. I hope to experiment with cylindrical mapping to get a cleaner wrap around the object.

Robot T_Pose.

This is my T_pose for the robot guard in the cinematic. The robot is inspired by the NS5 from iRobot using the basic shape of the torso and adapting the wires which make up the thighs and arms of the character. Originally I was only going to use a single eye but after playing around in Maya trying to make a plane bend round into a circular shape proved to be to difficult to make loom good. So I added an extra eye to balance it out. I after drawing it I found i preferred this to the single eyed alternative. 

I figured that a robot which seems more humanoid would be scarier than one which does not because robots imitating humans starts to make us seem obsolete, which is why the design of the robots in iRobot and Terminator are so life like.