Its Aliiiivvveee!

Finally! After months of trying to get this head looking as good as i could, this is the final result.

Its not perfect as you can see, but i am still extremely chuffed with what i have produced. This is putting into fact that I never grasped a massive interest in computer graphics from the beginning. I took the project on board anyway as did everybody else, and created a countless amount of face models (or more like five or six), trying to get as fluid and natural at the program as i possibly could.

The strength of the entire project I believe is the lip syncing.  I knew my model wasnt going to be up to standard, so I wanted to reedem myself in the blend shape process. I felt more comfortable in this stage than i did with the actual modelling. I have some experience with lip syncing in programs like Adobe Flash, so this must have had something to do with it.

Anyway I have done what I can and the project is now over. Bearing this is in mind, for now I will keep Maya on my computer. I could be feeling in a Maya sort of mood one day and might fancy giving it a second chance, but for now the bookmark is in place.

Final Touches

Well I never thought this day would come, I am now just moments away from finishing my Maya project. I have tweaked the model all I can now, and unless youre blind, its pretty obvious that its not exactly perfect (down the front anyways). In the end though I believe that is the only weakness of the design. The lip sync went down pretty well I think, and when its all exported and tweaked etc, I will get round to uploading it to ol’ Youtube.

The image above is just the model in preview mode before I go ahead and render. I thought I had better get a screen snap of this moment, just to remind me of the satisfaction and relief I feel right now. For me this is one of the best moments when creating something, being at the point of eagerly awaiting to exhibit your work to the rest of the world.

You Are What You Eat

Ok well here you have it, the final version of my flash project.

The objective was to think up a saying/quote and then base a video, preferablly made in Adobe Flash, around the chosen saying/quote.

As you can see from the title, my video is themed around the term ‘You Are What You Eat’. For this video I wanted to visually interpret the saying with good humour. Therefore whatever the characters take a bite of, they almost instantly morph into that specific piece of food.

I am very satisfied with the final result, but of course the only flaw in the video is there is no speech. This is due to the fact my microphone decided to die on me, so I had to recover this issue visually with a comic book styled dialogue. The soundtrack gives the video its comical vibe which is satisfying to see. Now that this is out the way, I can focus on Short Form and touching up Maya!

Maya Gone Mad On Me!

Ok so its nearing the deadline for the Maya project, and I have just constructed myself some more distinctive lips to give the model more of a human appearance. I based the lips on my own obviously, but for some reason they look like Mick Jagger lips haha. My lips aren’t that big in real life so dont know whats gone wrong there. Anyway that isnt what this is about, or not fully anyway. Basically I am at the stage where i can lip sync my model to a bit of dialogue, and I have done an audio recording ready for syncing.

So anyway I went to blend shape the first mouth movement, and almost soiled myself out of pure terror when i glanced upon the result. As you can see below, the head just sort of deteriates into lots of polygonal faces. The blend shapes worked fine when i just used flat faces for the lips, but now ive bulked them up it doesnt seem the head likes the change.

If anybody has experienced this in the past or just knows more about it, then id be grateful if you fancied dropping a reply on this post and letting me know what i have done wrong. For now I will have to go back to the old fashioned lips, and hopefully if someone helps me out then i could always go back to the Mick Jagger look. We shall see!

Listen Up!

At least my 3d head will be able to very soon. I have just completed my secondary model alongside the head, which is of course the ear.

By following the recommended tutorial below, the process was alot easier than I had assumed. The thing about my model head is when Filippa took the photos back in October, I was wearing a beanie. I decided to keep the beanie on my model head for accessory purposes, and it also gives me more to work with.

Anyway this means overall that the beanie will cover the majority of my ears, so the model doesn’t have to be absolutely impeccable. As you can see from the image below it does look like an ear and I’m not meaning to sound lazy when I say it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just means that I can move forward sooner if I conclude with the ear as it is.

Animation Intro – Keyframing/Shape Blending

This mornings session with Liam has been tiresome, considering i got no sleep at alll the night before, yet an educational step in my knowledge of using maya. We have now progressed from modelling shapes to animation techniques. These techniques will apply to the second stage of our Maya project for modelling and animating our faces.

Liam created a humorously irritating lip sync animation by demonstrating the use of a tool called shape blending. He record his voice and imported it into Maya, and by using the soundwaves of the file as a guide, he could match the lip movements to the soundwaves and therefore create an accurate animation.

I will try this at home later on with my face and see if i can finally bring my self alive by speaking my polygonal mind!

Step 2 : Maya

After following the recommended Youtube tutorial (embedded below) and with the guidance of Elliott at our shoulders, we all cracked on and started to construct our model heads. Everyone did a really good job and prduced some strong first models. Since we are all new to the program, Elliott took us through the stages step by step, as we all worked simultaneously. Steadily paced, nobody got left behind and nobody went ahead.

I now feel a lot better about the project knowing that I have something to work with, and it looks like a face too haha. Over the many weeks to come, I will produce many more 3d heads to get myself comfortable and natural at the program. But as the situation stands for now, I would give myself a pat on the back if I could.

Step 1 : Photoshop

So before we could get started on modeling our heads, we needed something to model from. Luckily enough, Filippa had prepared for this very moment and was able to get shots of the group. We all need two photos overall, one from the front and one from the side, to give us the full 3d workstation while we modeled. My two snaps are presented below as you can see.

Once everybody had their moment in front of the camera, we all dragged our photos from the SD memory card supplied. Elliott then talked us through bringing both our photos to the same proportions. This means that when we come to model our heads, the front and side views will be aligned and no dodgy heads will hopefully occur.

To achieve these results, we had to create horizontal black lines across our main facial features (as shown below) on one of the pictures. The second picture would then simply be bought into play and re sized, which would then put both pictures at exactly the same size and proportion.

Once this task was completely by everyone, we saved our pictures as two separate files. This meant we were ready to import them into Maya and get modelling.

Study Group Session 2

Yesterday, the second study group was in order. Improving from last time, we managed to shotgun the room next door to our class from 5 30pm – 9pm for a solid Maya session. The session was run by Elliot, who has had previous experiences with the program. Elliot and I set up the projector for the lecture, and once everyone had arrived, we began the task.

For an assignment we were set to create our faces and animate them, so Elliot (who is a mile ahead of everyone else) gave us a detailed step by step guide on modelling our faces using Maya and Photoshop.

More Maya!

Today we were shown by Liam how to create NURBS curves. Quite a sophisticated tool, enabling the animator to draw a shape along one axis and then the program generates a 360 circumference around the grid. Seeing as it doesn’t take long to generate results, above are two effortless plays with the tool.

After getting bored with making simple, yet repetitive shapes, I decided to have a go at modeling my water bottle, and I’m pretty chuffed with the result.