Day 178

Now to do the head. Here are the references I was given.

The book wanted me to use the method similar to what I did with Harvey awhile ago. This is where I see the smoothed version as I work while I'm really manipulating the boxy version underneath. I'm not sure if that makes sense to you. I'm not a huge fan of it because the boxy version can end up crazy looking since I'm not actually seeing it. Anyway, here's the general shape above.

So modeling mainly consists of extruding sections in and out while making them bigger or smaller, adding in more detail when needed and then tweaking things here and there. Here I pulled out some ears, pushed in the eye socket, pulled out the nose and pushed in the nostrils.

Next I created the mouth and refined the face more. I rotated the eye sockets so they face forward more. I also created the mouth cavity which was a little tricky. You can't see it but you'll see why I had to make it eventually. Finally, I modeled the glasses below. It'll be missing one lens. 

Day 177

Time to start my next book. I've been sick lately so unfortunately, I haven't been as productive as I should have been.  Anyway, first up is to model another dog. Above are the reference images I was given.

Here I'm roughing out the general shape of the body. I'll be modeling the body and head separately so I just left a hole where the head will go.

I extruded out the legs and feet followed by the arms and hands. The book had me copy the toes from the feet and attach them to the hand. It wasn't much of a shortcut since I had to spend time tweaking the toes to fit the hand and making them look more finger like.

Below is what the body looks like all smoothed out.

Day 173

This was far from the most complex scene I've made but the above image is probably my favorite one I've made so far. I didn't talk about all the steps of making the previous video since I wanted the sword reveal to be a surprise. Finn's sword was pretty easy to make and was made from simple shapes. For the nicks in the blade, I made small cubes and placed them where the nicks should be. Then I was able to subtract the small cubes from the blade to create the nicks. This type of action is known as a boolean operation which is a math term but it fits. You can subtract, add or get the difference between shapes. 

Next I needed a background image. I looked for an actual picture of the Ice King's lair from the show but those usually had characters in it too. I eventually found this pattern on an Ice King wallpaper which I liked. So I set up the background and ground and made them reflective since they should be like ice. I created two lights which are the red dots above. One is ambient to fill the scene with light and the other is a point light to generate the shadow. The shadow is too sharp but I was ok with it. Gunther's reflection on the wall didn't have a shadow though so I had to change some settings to fix that. This probably added a fraction of a second to the rendering time per frame which isn't bad but this video had 600 frames so it adds up. Lastly, I added a glow to the sword which looks nice in the top frame. Glow is a little finicky though and doesn't always act as expected. When making a single image, it's easy to see the results and change if needed. Unfortunately, you can't check every frame in a long movie so the sword doesn't consistently glow and flickers too. This was supposed to be a quick exercise so I didn't mind.

Day 172

Before moving onto my next book, I wanted to do a quick side project. I wanted to quickly model, texture, rig and animate something. So I picked a simple character: Gunther, the Ice King's penguin from Adventure Time. His body is just a smooth out cube with some wings pulled out of the sides, spheres for eyes, two half cones for the beak and some simple feet.

The feet, beak and eyes were textures using Maya's built in features. I painted the body directly in the program and then cleaned it up in Photoshop. Then I made the skeleton which will allow me to move the wings, beak, eyes, feet and overall body.

After the skeleton was made, I went around testing all the joints to make sure the body deformed properly. Then I went about animating the guy. I wasn't aiming on doing anything amazing. It was just some simple movements with a slight surprise at the end. 

Day 171

Next it's onto particle effects. The book wanted me to create a mist like effect coming off of the bike. Apparently it's a wet day. So to get particles, I need to create an emitter to emit them. I did this by drawing a curved line around the wheels which you can see if you enlarge the above picture. So the particles will be emitted from this curve. I can choose the type of particle and the book had me use sprites so each particle is actually a little picture of mist.

The particles can be made to react with things as well so I had them bouncing off of the different scooter parts. When I was done, I thought all this mist coming off the bike just looked weird so I changed things so it'll look more like exhaust coming out of the back. Tweaks to the particles can be how many appear, how long before they disappear, size and color. Here I made the smoke start out as grey and change to white. 

Next I made water droplets come off of the bike. Must have been a really wet day. Now I'm just using a different particle type. I made them slightly translucent with randomized blueish streaks of color. I made the material reflective and gave it a randomized bump map which gives it a shimmery look. All of which you can barely see in the final video but here's a close up picture below.

So finally here's the video again with some physics and particles. After seeing how this site compressed the video, I realized you can't really see the drops but don't worry; they're there.

There were a couple of more chapters after this but they mainly dealt with a program that isn't being supported anymore (this book was release in 2010). They had to do with rendering different parts of the scene separately and then combining them in this other program. So I just read through these chapters but didn't do any of the lessons. Now I'm officially done with this book. Overall, I thought it was a pretty good. I liked how all the lessons involved the same project so by the end, I get a nice final video. My next book is made by the same people and follows up right after this one. It's slightly more advanced and focuses just on characters and animation. So get ready for some more anthropomorphic animals.

Day 170

Now at this point I thought I was done with the book. But instead of the usual "good luck with your future endeavors" at the end, I saw "in the next chapter, you'll learn..." instead followed by the index. Turns out there are more chapters in PDF form in the books supplemental files that go on for about another 150 pages. Kind of a downer.  Anyway, the next chapter had to do with physics and objects crashing into each other known as dynamics.

By default, objects don't interact with each other when they collide. You can see in the last video that the dog's elbow goes right through one of the lampposts. But you can easily change that. I can turn objects into active or passive rigid bodies. Active means that they'll bounce around and react with things. Passive means that active bodies with react with them but they don't move themselves like the ground. In the scene, I made the ground and a few of the buildings passive and the trash active. Now I finally know why the book had me make the garbage 500 pages ago. The scooter should be active as well but to simplify things, I made a shape to represent the scooter and made that active instead.

Now the scooter shape crashes into the trash and sends it flying. Not quite that realistic as you can see above. So I have to create a gravity field and have that influence the trash. Then I can hide the scooter shape and render out the scene. There are a lot of variables to tweak as usual like the objects' mass, bounciness, friction, etc. Here the trash bags don't really move like bags but it's good enough.

Day 169

Now another animation with the dog riding the scooter. Above I've posed the dog on top of the scooter. I bent back the ears for the wind swept look.

Then I drew a line winding down the alley for the scooter to follow. I had the scooter bank side to side as it weaved down the alley. I made the tail sway side to side too but you can't really see that in these videos. I also made the handles and front wheel turn before the scooter turns but that isn't too noticeable either. Lastly, the book wanted me to make the dog pop a wheelie so I did that and added in some tweaks to make he dog react to landing back on the ground. I decided to make the head lights glow cuz it looked weird without it. Finally I animated the camera to capture everything.