Blog Progress Update Week 9

In this weeks blog progress update I go over the very basics of Maya Blendshape animation and my results with it. As i talked about in my previous blog post I completed a very basic head for the sake of learning blendshapes previously. I decided to do some research online to figure out the process of making blendshapes and i've found that they're rather simple so to speak. It's simply a process of taking two identical objects and the blending of them by moving around vertices. To start with I took my default head and duplicated it three times over and naming them what expressions i wanted to use.

From there I tweaked and played around with the vertices until I had the three expressions i was hoping for. After that you select all your expressions and the base head last and select Blendshape. After this you can get rid of the default heads if you want to and open up the base objects inputs and under Blendshape should be the names of the shapes you blended. Playing around with the numbers allows you to blend the shapes together. And that basically in the simplest of terms covers blendshapes. I wish i had more time to cover them but for now this is all the time i can dedicate to them.

Blog Progress Update Week 8

This is my blog progress update for the week of Monday March 8th 2013. This week  I worked on the head for blendshape animation as well as doing some research on how to do blendshape animation. When I started modeling i began using the technique in which you begin from the eye and expand from there. For the most part it was okay but i found it a very slow method of building a head and my schedule was very busy that week as such I decided to instead re-use a head I had already created for another character for a different project and it worked out pretty well as the head looked relatively normal and should be okay with deforming for blendshape animation.

I did some research into how blendshape animation and what they're about. blendshape animation is the process of creating an object duplicating it several times then changing or deforming them in some way. Beyond that it wasn't a great week for working on self directed and as such hope to do better once my schedule is able to clear up a bit and I can find time to sit down and work on it.

Blog Progress Update Week 7

In this weeks blog progress update i discuss what my start of Blendshape animation and what that means. So this week is the start of my next 3 week project in Self directed of which the topic is blendshape animation a topic that wasn't covered what so ever in classes and something that seems pretty important if I'm going to be a 3D animator in the future. So basically what Blendshape animation is about is the blending of one shape to another and, back again. This is used in animation by creating the basic face structures that a person makes and blending them together to give characters expressions and such. I'm hoping to cover this at least a little bit during this 3 week time even though i realize that I'm definitely not going to be able to cover all of it in that time. As such this week i found some reference pictures for a head front and side and began modeling. If I find i don't have enough time I'm likely going to just find a completed head and use it for expressions rather than create a new one from scratch.

Beyond the start of this i've also watched a couple of YouTube videos on Blendshape animation and will be looking into getting some books from my instructor on the topic this week so I can really figure out how to do this well. My biggest concern isn't the animation but time, since we are quickly running out of time left in the semester for creating assets and side projects like this take up a lot of the time I'd be using for other things. However i realize that animation projects are very important and expect to put in a fair bit of time on this one compared to my last project.