The End- Analysis Of Work

This is what I have accomplished for the Character Design Project. I didn't manage to finish Minnie's 3D design and animate her, but I managed to do a short 2D animation of what I would have done if I had managed to get to that stage.

It's the last day of the project, and I feel as if I've done okay, despite all the problems that cropped up. I feel as if I've learned a lot, and I have a clear view of where my strengths and weaknesses lie. I would like to analyse my work in this post.

What did I enjoy doing?
I thoroughly enjoyed doing all the sketchwork and early development of Wilhemina Biliams. I have always loved doing traditional drawings, and this was no exception. I also had a lot of fun modeling on Mudbox. That program made modeling high resolution 3D models a lot easier. I would recommend that program to anyone.

What did I dislike doing?
I found the research a little bit tedious, but it was fundamental to the development of my character. It also enabled me to rewatch films and clips and look at them from a different perspective, like "The Sword In The Stone", for instance.
I really didn't enjoy modeling in Maya. I don't really like Maya in general, to be honest. In a way, I am glad I modeled mostly in Mudbox because it saved me a lot of stress and frustration. But in other ways, it made some things harder to accomplish.

What did I struggle with?
Although Mudbox was great at making a decent looking model, I think it caused a lot of the problems that we encountered.
I have struggled with Maya, as always. I guess I'm more of a 2Dimensional person really, but I am annoyed that Maya is getting the better of me.

Have I worked well in a group?
I think me and Tom worked well together, and we were able to help eachother with our work output. He helped me with my modeling and rigging, and I helped him with my storyboarding. We have designed characters that have a similar "style" and I think I can picture them in a film together. Minnie and Wee Eck were made to be a romantic interest, and Me and Tom discussed ways in which we could do this successfully. We have listened to eachother's advice and we have communicated well. I don't think we had any issues of laziness or disagreements of any sort. I think we both pulled our weight and have come up with some good work because of this.

What have I learned during this project?
I have discovered some new programs that I have never used before, such as Puppet Master, Toonboom and Mudbox. I have learned to use them for the benefit of our work. I have also discovered what I really struggle with and what I really suceed with. I don't think my talents lie with modeling, rigging and texturing, but I am glad that I tried to improve in these areas. I think I know more about Maya then I did before the project, so that can only be a good thing. I feel that I am much better at doing quick sketches and drawings, and I should ensure that I use these skills to the max when working in a group in future

What could I have done differently to improve my work?
If I were to redo this project, I would not experiment as much with new flashy programs. I think I would have tried to stick with Maya and learn to model and rig and texture the hard nitty gritty way. I know I would have absolutely hated doing that, but I think I might have become more confident in Maya if I had emersed myself in it more.
I think I would have given myself a bit more time to do the 3D work aswell. We may have been able to back track and reconstruct Minnie to look and operate better if we had enough time. I was disappointed that I had not been able to animate Minnie at the end, because I was looking forward to doing that.
If I was given the choice again between doing Character Design, Environment Construction, or Animated Idents, I would immediately choose the ident project. I'll leave the Maya experts to do what they do best, and I would try and hone my drawing and animating skills!

Screenshots of Rigging

There's some damn freaky pictures right here.



Well, we managed to rig the old granny using Puppet Master. It's a program that makes rigging a bit simpler to do. You type in the right names for the right parts of the rig, and the program configures it for you. Sometimes it makes a few mistakes, but they can easily be sorted out. Pictured above is the final model with the rigging in place.

The rig came out fine, but it desperately needed weighting...
Check out these pictures. They show the severe distortion of the model when I tried moving the different controls

O____O

Scary huh?

So when I tried to transfer the Maya file for what it had done onto a memory device, it failed. I realized that the Maya file was exactly 81,000kb. That is one massive file!

I figured that it would be virtually impossible to work on something of this magnitude. There are so many polys in this model, and the way Mudbox has placed them has made it very difficult to work further on her.

So I've decided that I will end my progress there. I will now write an analysis of my work on this project. Check ya later!

Toonboom Animation

TAADAAAA

Here's what I managed to accomplish yesterday.
Now before you watch it, let me just say that this is very very sketchy and thats kinda intentional. I didn't want to do something really neat. Also, I was using a tablet for the first time in ages, so I'm not very used to drawing straight on to a computer.

It was quite fun doing this. Toonboom is remarkably easy to use. It's basically a simplified version of Flash. I will certainly use this program again to do simple animations. It has made me realize that I desperately need a tablet though. Seriously. Using a mouse to draw is impossible.

Very Slow Progress

I'll try and upload some snapshots of my failed attempts to rig Wilhemina a bit later. But first, here's a storyboard of an animation I was thinking if doing if I get to animate Minnie in Maya. Similarly to the previous storyboards I did, I wanted to show Minnie's strength and determination when chided by something.

This shows Minnie searching for her hat. She is startled by a monkey that descends from above with her precious hat. She steals it back roughly and places the hat back on her head as if it were a crown.


The way things have been going, I seriously doubt I will be able to animate this in 3D. However, if this is the case, I will do a quick sketchy animation based on this storyboard. If I have time, I might try and do an animation based on one of the other storyboards aswell. I'm going to attempt to use a program called Toonboom, which my tutor Mike has recommended. I have a bit of experience with Flash, so using Toonboom shouldn't be too difficult. I think they're both pretty similar. I'll let you know how that

Storyboard Ideas For Animations

Okay, as far as our modeling, rigging and texturing is concerned, we still have a lot of problems. However, I still wanted to do some sketches of possible animation ideas if we are able to animate our characters. I wanted to show Minnie's freakish strength and anger issues, and Wee Eck's endearing and humourous personality.

I think both show Minnie being a little too violent, but I think it would give us an opportunity to give her some really dynamic movement.


The first one shows Minnie's hat being knocked off by Wee Eck's broom...


... And the second one shows Wee Eck teasing Minnie by stealing her hat. This results in her punching him in the stomach (ow!)


I think I like the second one best, though I'm not sure whether Wee Eck is the kind of character who would playfully tease someone he has just met in his workplace. I just like the way the frames flow.

Clash Of The Titans.... Sort Of.

Here's a little doodle I wanted to draw with the two characters Minnie and Wee Eck. Ain't they lovely? I used one of Tom's reference sheets to help me draw the cheeky Scotsman.
I didn't have my full set of colouring pencils with me, so I just did a basic colouring job with they're 'Team colours'.

The Pains Of Modeling

I'm not even sure whether I'm spelling modeling right. If I keep spelling it wrong, I apologize. It's just my rebellious way of showing how much I "love" modeling.

Okay, I have hit quite a few 3 Dimensional barriers today. Trying to get Minnie into a good state to rig has proved to be more difficult then I thought. Her arms and legs have continued to be stubborn, and me and Tom have made a huge effort to try and find ways around this problem.

Here's a pic that illustrates one way we tried to solve our issues.


We tried using a default human body to replace the arms and legs, but as you can see, it really didn't suit her! She looks kinda like a sumo wrestler here. Also, the rest of the default body was inside the round body I had already made for her. It was basically one mass covering another. I knew that this was surely going to cause problems when it came to rigging.

Another thing we tried was exporting the Mudbox object and add the arms and legs on Maya, in the form of cylinders and cubes. However, I realized that we had the same problem as before; The cylinders were not joining to the body mesh.

The next thing I've been trying is extruding faces of the body's mesh to make arms and legs (in Maya). I am now smoothing off and sculpting the results of this in Mudbox. This seems to have made a vast improvement on Minnie's limbs.

Here's a shot of what she looks like at the moment.

She's been chopped in half so she can be mirrored later on.

Another problem I think I'm going to have is doing the texturing. I've tried texturing Minnie in Mudbox, which seemed very straight forward at first. Here's how she looked once I had painted her.

I had a go at importing this body with the textures into Maya, but when I rendered an image of the mesh, the paintwork didn't show up. I'm not sure whether this was due to an error I made in the settings on Maya or Mudbox, or whether this is an actual problem which will affect whether I will be able to texture Minnie or not.

For the time being, I am going to concentrate on finishing the modeling and beginning the rigging.