Got the coding sorted

Having now made the control shapes for my rig i feel much more confident with the process. The coding aspect was almost a complete mystery to me baby steps taking me through making code to create control shapes has made me allot more confident and understand where i was going wrong.

 As a key part of rigging my control shapes may not be up to scratch, for instance the ones on the left and right are very slightly different shapes because I'm not sure if there is a way to mirror them, but its something i will look into. I have also just accidentally deleted the jaw control shape somehow but will replace that before i move onto the next section.

In our last class we were given the options for our final hand ins.

I am taking on the 3D character art brief, i have to create a hero character, either a futuristic shaman, a celtic barbarian, or a naturalistic warrior (Perhaps native american). I will then make a high poly and low poly model for a game, a 3D turntable and rig the models.

At the moment i am thinking of using the Barbarian idea, because it would also increase my human anatomy knowledge allot by looking at muscle groups.

The Skeleton

In our last lab we learnt the basics of putting bones into our 3D meshes. An essential part of the rigging process that was simpler than i thought it would be in many ways, though the local rotation axis are tricky to figure out. After putting the bones into the hand i noticed that many of the axis were all over the place. I tried to fix them but i couldn't get them perfect.

Here is a picture of my final skeleton. Most of the transformations i tried worked well, the fingers bent as well as id thought they would, but the knees both bend slightly to the middle of the mesh, and the wrist joints take part of the hip with them when they move. This shows me i need to re do the LRA of the knee joints, and possibly the fore arms.

This week in Computer Arts Practice we did "Live Drawing" 

Spending a maximum of 4 minutes on each drawing we drew passers by trying to capture a sense of personality and movement.

I reverted back to my loose and scribbly drawing style for this task, something i find very useful for quickly marking down peoples shapes and movements, though it does look messy and unprofessional .

The lady with the pram at the top right looked like she was pushing around a stack of bricks with the way she was leaning, but I'm not sure if i captured it successfully.

The bottom right pair on this page were one of my favourite drawings of the day, i liked the line-work and the loose expression of movement in the legs.

I thought this page was a success, i started to draw them more as caricatures,  which i think helped me to emphasise movement and the character i was giving these passers by.

By this point the caricatures had degraded into bad drawing, which is a shame, because the walking stick man was one of the most interesting people i tried to draw.

I liked this one of a woman who looked very fed up with her boyfriend, though i think i got the legs in the wrong pose for her movement making her look unbalanced.

As i'm hoping to specialise into creature design and the 3D modelling of creatures and characters, the skill of accurately drawing different poses and emotions will be important to the design of the characters ill be working on.

This is definitely a lesson i had fun doing, i enjoy drawing people and the quick loose style suits me very well, and i think that a few of my drawings were good examples of quick character sketching.

However i think i need to put more time into drawing faces and expressions as it was a major weak point in my drawing all throughout university. I also think i need to work on my line work to lend more professionalism to my sketches

In our lab this week we learned the basics of scripting in maya, and the Python coding. We started of by making a cube, then a grid of cubes and then experimenting with our code.

I ended up with alternating rows of taller rectangles, with tiny square hats on the smaller ones, and alternating cone hats on the front row. The code i used was



import maya.cmds
#For every warrior we want in out army
for z_position in range(20):
    for x_position in range(20):
        #if the z position is even
        if z_position%2 == 0:
             maya.cmds.polyCube(w=0.75, h=3, d=0.75)
             #spawn a cube in a different height
             maya.cmds.xform(t=(x_position-10, 1.5, z_position-10))
        else:
            #Create a cube
            maya.cmds.polyCube(w=0.75, h=2, d=0.75)
            #Positionh the cube in a formation
            maya.cmds.xform(t=(x_position-10, 1, z_position-10))
            #if this is the first cube in a row
            #create a cone above it
        if x_position ==0:
            if z_position%2 ==0:
                maya.cmds.polyCone(r=0.25, h=2)
                maya.cmds.xform(t=(x_position-10, 3.5, z_position-10))
            else:
                maya.cmds.polyCone(r=0.25, h=1)
                maya.cmds.xform(t=(x_position-10, 2.5, z_position-10))
        else:
            maya.cmds.polyCube(w=0.25, h=0.25, d=0.25)
            maya.cmds.xform(t=(x_position-10, 2.125, z_position-10))

This is a useful skill to me that i'm looking to develop much further and hopefully take into scripting and dynamics next semester. It will help me speed up my work pipeline in 3D modelling and rigging by allowing me to use code to do menial repetitive tasks.

My copy of "Maya Python for Games and Film" has arrived , so i will start reading through it.

This week we drew Still Life, i took a shot at drawing a lamp and think it turned out okay. I think the line work was better than allot of my previous work, and the shading turned out well.

Working towards being a 3D artist this skill is important to me as attention to detail is key, as well as having a good grasp on objects in 3D space.

I plan to practice this more, but i don't think i need as uch practice in it as some of my other skills.