Category: Maya

This is my final output for the face modelling exercise. overall I’m very happy with my progress. While I can clearly improve, mostly with shifting weight around the face as a person speaks. I think for my first attempt at facial animation, especially with my own rigged and modeled face, it has come out quite well. I attempted to match the lighting of the original scene by using Maya’s lighting tools to match what I assumed to be the light set up.

As he’s fully lit all around with only minimal shadows in the original scene I assumed a three point lighting system was implemented with fairly bright key, back and fill lights so his face is fully lit up. The light was soft as well so I made sure it was widely dispersed.

Alongside this to create the texture for his eyeball being rolled into the back of his head as I retextured the older eye ball texture that we had and split the UVs from the back of the model to the back of the eyeball creating the a fully rounded eyeball with a blank back rather than a duplicate of the front side.

Lastly I modeled his gums and added a tongue though neither of those can be seen in the render as the original actor really doesn’t show much of any, his face movements are subtle.

Overall the thing I struggled with the most during this was properly animating the face and creating all the blend shapes necessary to make it fully work. Maya gave me some issues itself as its UI isn’t all the easy to read when it comes to knowing what exactly you’re shifting at a given point alongside visual glitches.

This week we came to try out hand at animating the faces we had constructed over the last few weeks. We were told to get a short clip and I took one from Dune. Specifically from 1:17-1:21 when Thufir gives an estimate of how much the space travel costs them.

Learning to use the animation tools alongside the blend shapes to create the mouth shapes was pretty difficult. The biggest issue was with Maya itself as it often would shift the heat, not display my changes or would show a different key frame after adjustments were made. This made working on these blend shapes very difficult as I would constantly have to stop to correct Maya.

While the mouth movements have gotten quite far along I will have to go back to add movement to other key areas of the face like the cheeks to add more realism to the animations. Skin is attached to the entire face so when one part shifts so does all the immediate areas especially around the cheeks.

Overall my biggest challenges this week were handling Maya’s unique issues and keeping track of what blend shapes I was editing and which keyframes were being adjusted.

This week I had a unique technical issue occur. My hard drive that I had been keeping my latest work died and as a result was set back to the work I had done the previous week. As a result many quality of life updates to the model I had performed were lost and while I was able to re-do some of them there are issues that I need to re-address later when I have more time. My main focus was to catch up and re-do the work we had done on Monday. Namely learning how to make use of the Set Driven animation tool.

Using this tool we added animations such as the mouth contorting in such a way when its open that the skin moves and resembles more so what happens to a real face.

The biggest challenge this week by far was dealing with the loss of my progress and work and having to redo it all. It does of course re-enforce my learning and teach me how to deal with these situations should they occur in the workplace.

This week we continued to refine our face model by learning how to rig it using joints and skinning. While the joint work was a decently simple the skinning proved to be far more difficult. Trying to get the right distribution of weight to make sure the joints only affected the appropriate parts of the head were difficult. Especially getting it to work on the finer points of the model. Even with zooming in I found it difficult to paint the weight accurately.

In addition to that we also made teeth for our person’s mouth.

Another big development specifically for my model was with the help of Nick I learned more about how to use Maya’s tool set to fix the ears on my model and get far more accurate UVs as a result. Specifically using a combination of edge loops and the multi-cut tool to create better edge flows and removing verts that had far too many edges attached to it. Those verts with too many edges attached was the main culprit behind my UV issues.

In this week we continued to work on our face models with a focus on two areas, texturing the face and creating and texturing eyeballs for our face model. Alongside that we as well got more experience when it came to using the shape editors to create differing states for our model

Texturing was a new challenge as previously our texturing with UVs would have involved only simple shapes however with something as complex as a human face I came to see the important of being very careful when creating the models as the ears had several issue where multiple faces were linked together at a single point on the UV map due to my modelling of the ear. This made manipulating the UV shells very difficult and while I managed to get it to work in the end it has taught me why and how to be more careful the next time I start modeling.

In addition to this we were introduced to Mudbox, a texturing program bundled with Maya that allowed us to edit the texture directly while it was wrapped around our models head. This allowed me to fix some issues with seams being apparent on the model around the back of the head. As well with adding skin to areas of the eye that were previously textured to resemble an empty eye socket instead of eye lids.

Lastly here is a render of my most current model

For this week we used a base scanned model of a human face to use Quad Draw to produce our own human face in accordance to the proper topology lay out. This was pretty difficult for me especially when it came to doing the ears. While I had doubts about doing the entire head Nick telling us to just do half and then mirror it later on made a lot of sense in both time saving and effort as any asymmetrical elements could simply be added later on.

We started out with the two major elements of the face, the eyes and the mouth. Obviously important because the mouth needs to be done right so mimicking mouth movements for speech are important. The eyes share the same reason for being as important as the mouth because a lot of communication with facial expressions comes from both the eyes and the mouth.

Eventually I managed to make the ears and mirror the face to create the final product here.

This week for our development we focused on refining the Balloon from last week. We examined how to use hypershade’s node system along with bump maps and downloaded textures to add detail to existing objects through texturing. This mostly came through in the addition of nicks and scratches in the hoses and burner chassis and metal parts.

In addition to this I remade the ropes to make them look thinner and more realistic. Along with that we added further detail by giving them a realistic looking point to attach to the balloon. Previously they disappeared up into the balloon itself but now using polygon primitives and bend tools we created rings to wrap the ropes around and bind them.

Lastly we set up a small turntable animation for the balloon to rotate around in 3D space and to render it out as a .exr sequence to use in our Nuke class for our rotoscoping training.

As a clever trick as I was running out of time to add any more details I made small tubes that go into the bottom frame and have the ropes feed into them. This way it does actually look like the ropes are attached to the frame by appearing to enter the frame itself.

This week we focused on developing a hot air balloon which we would later use during our Nuke course. This was our first time doing a complex model that would be later fully rendered into a composition. At first I thought it wouldn’t be too difficult but seeing how much detail there really is on a hot air balloon came as a surprise to me. Modelling from large parts such as the balloon and the basket down to smaller parts like the burners or the gas tank.

We made more use of the EP Curve tool and the revolve tool which I had used back in my first week to make a vase. We learned more about its functions and its settings and how to make use of them. Especially interesting is using the EP curve tool along with extrude in order to create the twisting ropes.

Lastly we learned how to do more texturing via UV maps and different materials. Like using the UV maps for making the weave on the interior of the basket.

For our second week we started out with a project to develop a model based on a lego figure, creating a base that we can use to make any additions that we would like in future with texturing, faces or clothing. The purpose of this exercise was two fold. First it would teach us to be critical of our work and focus on mimicking a real object as much as possible as it mimics what we would be doing in the industry. Collecting reference images and importing them so we can use them.

The second purpose was to get us more intimate with Maya’s tools for modeling, showing us how versatile one simple tool like extrude could be used in multiple ways to produce tons of different effects. In addition we explored more sculpting tools such as relax and smooth.

In addition to that I modeled a Lego sword for the Lego man.

And lastly I textured the Lego man with some colors and with the help of a tutorial online used the UV editor to create a face for him using an image of a Lego face I found online. I also adjusted the model’s arms and legs to try out posing in Maya.

This first week our professor Nick Savy introduced us to Maya and got us familiar with the UI. As part of our practice to familiarize ourselves with Maya’s tools and shortcuts he had us produce a model of a Tesla Cybertruck. We worked our way through modeling, texturing and some compositing work.

Later in the week I also produced in my off time a model for a chair with a wicker seat. I chose this is a chair’s rectangular frame would be simple enough with polygon cubes to create and let me further familiarize myself with Maya’s UI and shortcuts with the wicker seat adding a new challenge in creating the crisscrossed pattern and the open face of the chair.

To create the open face of the chair I had the idea to make a standard cube as the chair’s seat, then using the insert edges function I mapped out the interior of the seat making it a separate face from the rest of the cube and simply deleted it. While this had the affect of creating the hole it left the edges open without a face. A friend told me about the bridge tool so using that I simply bridged those edges and closed the faces creating the hollow cube that I then placed the wicker inside of which I created by smoothing multiple thing rectangles that I then merged into a single object.

I added an object to it and using the soft pull feature of Maya I bent the wicker giving it the illusion of having the weight of the object on it.

Lastly on Friday with the aid of a tutorial I modeled a vase with the help of a YouTube tutorial that got me familiar with the Curves and Surfaces tools such as EP Curve tool and Revolve.