Blog Progress Update Week 6

In this weeks blog progress update i worked with NCloth and did some cool tutorial work. In these tutorials i worked with Ncloth a way of simulating Cloth texturing and object collisions in Maya. I followed the tutorials from the site CG tuts+ (LINK) The tutorial was very simple and easy to follow and covered two separate things; a flag in the wind and a ball landing on a cloth. The first tutorial involved setting up a cloth and a flagpole and having the cloth changed into a Ncloth material, then have part of it act as a passive collider hidden in the pole. After that it's just a matter of applying some wind effects to it and than that's it.

The second tutorial involves using a piece of Ncloth again creating a sphere and applying a passive collider to the object. after seeing it work once it was just a matter of making a portion of the cloth tearable and from there it tore through it as advertised. So that was pretty much the tutorials i was pretty happy with the results and I'm looking forward to my next small project which is blend shapes which will take up the next 3 weeks of my self directed schedule.

Blog Progress Update Week 5

 This is my blog post for the week of Monday February 11th 2013. In this weeks progress update i created a run cycle animation using the Creative crash Dog rig mentioned last week. Starting out i went online and searched for a dog run cycle reference. I found the reference picture i ended up using on the site http://3dpalmieri.wordpress.com/ . I found a couple problems with the rig after using it for a while as well. The foot was missing a rotation point at the ankle and as such made it difficult to line up with the animation that was on the reference picture.

I also had some problems copying animation keys, but i feel like that was more like a problem on my end rather than the rig, as it kept copying the whole rig rather than the keys really messing up the rig, when i went to paste. I feel like I could have cleaned the animation up a bit better if i had the time but i got the end goal i was hoping for and when i come back to it later it won't take long to make it nice enough for my portfolio. Sort of unsure what to do about crediting the creator of the Rig and model so I'll have to look into it a bit before considering using it. All and all I'm pretty happy with the animation i had created and look forward to my next mini project a high definition human hand and animation for it.

Blog Progress Update Week 4

This is my blog progress update for the week of February 4th 2013. This week I worked on the 3D model that i started last week with concept art. The model itself isn't particularly difficult but i realized pretty quickly that if i wanted my model to be presentable that I'd have to put in more time than i have available on this side project. Especially since I'm more concerned with working on the animations with this rig and I felt like this model wouldn't be good enough to work with to put into a portfolio. As such i decided to go looking for a new Rig that I can use for animation.

The rig i found was on Creative Crash (Link) listed as a free rig. I played around with it a bit and it seemed to be a very in-depth model. As such next week I plan to work on a walk cycle or something along that line and playing around a bit with the dog rig. I realize that i could have probably had a half decent dog model had i put more time into this model but my other projects have kept me more busy than i expected and it really cut down the time i was expecting to have to work on this model. I may have to rethink the next side portion of my self directed if time will continue to be this much of a constraint.

Blog Progress update Week 3

This is the blog progress update for the week of January 28th 2013. This week I began an estimated three week project to model, and animate a quadruped model. I chose to model a dog since it seems like a relatively simple thing to create and animate that would have quite a bit of materials to reference back to for animating and modeling.

Link to photo source.

Drawing a dog was a tad bit more of a challenge than i was expecting mainly do to the fact that i'm really only used to drawing people. We haven't had much experience drawing animals in anyway shape or form. As such it took me much longer than i hoped to finish this drawing and even more time to get it scanned due to lacking a scanner anywhere near by meaning i had to walk back to the classroom and use that scanner. Anyway this week for the most part was more about setting up the model, since i don't expect it to take too long and it's not going to be textured in anyway. So in conclusion expect to see more progress next week as i begin the modeling and rigging process.