Rigging, My current class

so this month I am taking Rigging. What rigging consists of is placing joints inside of a skeleton so that you can move the model around. With the picture I am showing, there is a skin layer outside of this skeleton but I have it hidden so that you can see the joints clearer. I am further along in this process so these pics aren't what you would start with but kind of in the middle before the advanced rig that i'm working on right now.


this is the skeleton just relaxed. You're most likely wondering why there are letters and arrows around the skeleton. The S stands for shoulders and it's the icon that an animator can select if he/she wishes to move the clavicle, scapula, arm bones, etc. when you click on the S, it makes all of these moveable at once. Just as the other icons which i will show in a minute to give you a better idea of how things work in rigging.

I just translated this up in the Y axis. if you notice the shoulders move along with the clavicle and scapula. The way that this works is that the rig is built up of an hierarchy chain. first the child, then the parent. so when you want something to drive something else or one to take dominance over the other, you use the hierarchy. Simple example is if you move your shoulder. If you watch it, what is moving along with it? your ulna, radius, hand, and your scapula and clavicle. so it makes sense why we would create a control that drives all of these. the shoulder bone is parented to the left clavicle IK handle. The IK is used for rotation. i'll keep it simple. (still following along?)

so what i did here is move the arrow icon. I parented the eyes to follow the icon, but however there is something else parented to the icon as well, these are called locators.


If you notice the highlighted objects, these are the locators. The eyes would be the child and the locators the parent. Hopefully that makes sense. So the locators are the child to the arrow icon, and the arrow icon the parent. That way I can either select the arrow icon and the locators will tag along due to being the child of the parent, or I can move the locators individually and the eyes will follow because they are the children to the locators....make sense? I hope so. It's really just logic if you think about it. Anatomy plays a role a little bit in helping figure out what should be the parent of what.

This is an example of what an IK does. The purple surface is where I attached the IK handle to.


As you can see it allows me to bend the arm in a certain fashion, but if you look at the V icon in the background, that is there to allow me to translate up or down in the y axis as well as constrain my elbow so my rig doesn't break....an example is that you can only twist your arm so far because it stops, adding a pole vector constraint to the arm keeps is from going crazy.

What I was thinking about doing for anyone who's interested is recording a little bit of me fiddling around with the rig so you can get the idea of what's going on. If you have read this far, please leave a comment letting me know if you would like to see a little youtube video of me moving the parts around and I will record and upload it. I'll record a 30 sec to a min clip just kind of explaining how things move around. Plus its a good refresher for me = )


that's all for now, back to studying.

Trip to Palm Beach

Yesterday I was invited by my friend to go to a drifting competition in palm beach. It was a pretty fun drive but the scenery was kind of boring. Nothing really to look at except the same countryside for 2 1/2 hrs. Once we got there it was pretty cool to see all of the different types of cars competing and they had a little section where they could practice drifting on the track. We were hoping for a little more excitement then what we got, but overall, it wasn't too bad. We ran into the owner that had sold my friend his car and since he runs most of the competition, we were able to go "backstage" (if you want to call it that, more on the other side of the fence) and take a look at some of the cars and meet the people driving them. Overall it was a good trip and I wound up driving his car for awhile back home since he was tired. If you didn't know he has a very nice car! well, as far as racing goes. We wanted to put his car into the drag competition, but decided against it because if it broke down, we have no ride home, lol. Here are some pics of the day. I will upload a video from my camera to youtube if anyone wanted to watch. I also wanted to thank lorena for the cool tripod = ) It's very useful. Before I left I came across a raccoon who was watching me, lol. He was scared so I didn't get too close but I setup my camera and got the best pic I could.



Jays Engine. His car is fast!!A racing car. Mazda Miata used for a racing school.


Here's the raccoon.

A 300zx on the practice track. If I had money, I would like to try it out. These people kill their tires since they're peeling out a lot. The whole place smelled like burned rubber! I think I still get faint smells of it!

Another racing car from the same school. I guess the school is sponsored by mazda.

Happy Valentine's Day

so happy valentine's day to everyone. especially lorena = ) I hope everyone is having a good day. I am happy today because I got a 100 on my test so i feel like things are going good in this class.

I can't remember how Valentine's day got started so I decided to look up the history of it and came across this. it's always nice to know how things got started and why we celebrate these days in our lives and history is cool (not the class though, lol).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine%27s_Day

so anyways, no new stuff to post yet. I have maya 2008 on my mac laptop and am running bootcamp for my pc so ill try to get some screenshots taken then i can post my little duck script that I did for class.

Anyways, I want to take a moment and say thanks to the people who post comments on my blog. It really means a lot to know that people take the time to post, either just to say hi or talk about whatever. I know people are busy and have lots of things to do each day. so when they take the time to comment, I feel special, thanks!!

I hope everyone has a good day.

onto the next month!

HOORAY! I finally finished my 2 classes of mel scripting and production modeling. I have learned a great deal from both and hope that I will continue to remember everything that is taught to me. I just finished my final projects which i spent the last 3 days working 16 hrs each day to get them finished and/or working correctly! This month certainly has been an interesting one and definitely a tough one. I also am glad that it's over and i'm moving onto rigging (putting joints, bones inside of 3d models to make them move). It's the only class i'm taking this month because it's so in depth so I will have 17 lectures/labs. Normally ill have 2 classes per month 1 class is usually 10 lectures/labs, and the other class around 7-8 lectures/labs. Since I'm hoping to have a little more time this month, I decided to start working on my own individual studies to help keep me fresh and continue improving on what I want to do (which is animation). So today I was looking around for some pre-built rigs and found a couple of them that I liked so I downloaded them and posed a couple just to show you what i'll be working on.
B4 that though, let me show you one of my final projects. Since my code only works right now for the pc, i'll have to wait to show others the pictures of my duck, once i have that, then i'll post them along w/ the GUI. I do however have my head model I can show.

This is the side wireframe of me. We were required to build a bust of ourselves

this is the side view also without the wireframe so you can see the smoothness. Does it look like me?

here's the front view wireframe

here's the front view smooth. Does it still look like me? Maybe a little?

So onto the next part. Like I was saying before I'm going to keep building assets so that by the end of the year when it comes to demo reel time, I will have a whole library of animations that I had been working on and also a bunch of extra things to throw onto my demo reel. I'm excited to keep improving in animation. It certainly is a lot of fun to give a lifeless object life and character. Here are some of the rigs that I will be using for my individual studies = ) just so you know, since I was getting used to the rigs, I posed them and took a screen shot to make them more interesting.

A ball w/ legs and a tale? Is he starting the moonwalk? Eat your heart out Michael Jackson!

Since I can't touch my tongue to my big nose, I decided to have this guy do it for me = )


Scooby Scooby Doo!! I love this dog! It's going to be fun making this quadriped move. The only thing about the dog though is that its ears and face don't move = ( But at least i'll be able to make him wag and run and walk, sit, etc. And another bonus is that I don't have to feed him or clean up his poop!

Ruh Roh, he's getting ready to pounce!

I will definately post some animations of this dog once I get some fun things started with him. I'm excited to show others what I work on. I love to hear feedback and suggestions if any.

I hope that everyone's day has been good and I start my classes back up tomorrow so I hope to hear from anyone who reads this soon and look forward to posting more stuff!

KEEP MOVING FORWARD!

Bringing in the new year happy 2008!

So I was at the bookstore the other day and I was looking around and found a cool book. So me being me, I bought it = ) (cmon it was about the 80s and the toys and games I play w/...I had too)
Anyways, anyone who knows me always knows that I think the decade of the 80s was totally awesome because i was born in 80 and I feel that so many important changes happened during that time for society and I was lucky enough to grow up in the middle of it. Music was crazy, movies were awesome, people were exploring new realms that had never been explored before such as computer graphics, cellphones, creation of better toys, etc etc and which would lead into the 90s w/ internet etc. To me the 80s have always been an exciting time....weird, but exciting..I usually find myself laughing at the outrageous styles and the big bangs girls had....like my sister, lol...I love you Kell! don't get offended please. So anyways, I just finished reading the book and it was such a good and fun book to read. I love reading about the old games, and toys, etc that I used to play with friends and family. It's certainly endearing and meaningful. I still find myself listening to 80s music because of it's awesome keyboards and just the creation of the music as a whole (there are so many sounds mixed into each song and people were experimenting w/ new technology as well in music)! Who doesn't know Huey lewis and the News or Genesis or Phil Collins, Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode, Vanilla Ice or people such as Michael Jackson and Twisted sister....ok we can do without twisted sister, lol, but in all seriousness....who could say that the movies like The Goonies, Transformers, etc etc. were bad movies? No one I know. Well, maybe Lorena doesn't like the Transformers, but she's the exception ;P I remember crying when they killed optimus prime in the Transformers movie....they killed the main character...what movie did that at the time? None that I knew of.

I just remember so many great times. I would go to the mall with my mom and she would drop me off at Aladdin's Castle. The best arcade at the time, lol. Now there are no arcades = ( I eventually hope to open my own arcade one day w/ a bookstore and a store like starbucks attached to it. I will call it Cafe 80s (what's that from? Anyone, if you know...you just might like an 80s movie). But I think it would be cool to have a place like that. I've never seen one.

I'm sure if you made it this far, my blog might be somewhat entertaining so I though you should know that as I type this i'm watching Big Trouble in Little China and working on my .mel script for school and eating yogurt, and i'm as happy as can be, lol. These movies are so great and I feel like a lot of the newer movies that are coming out have been letting me down. I feel that they are putting so much stuff in the movie that the simple storylines and such are getting lost...either that or it could just be the movies i'm watching, lol. There was a good one recently..."Juno" I would suggest that to anyone.

My thoughts on the decade of 2000. I think the decade of 2000 is who can make something better which is good but not new, I mean the technological leaps and bounds that are being made every 5-6 months is amazing! But at times, its seems to me that it's like well we already have this stuff, let's just keep adding things onto it. So you buy a top of the line laptop for 2500 - 5k$ and then in 6 months it's outdated and you have to upgrade to play even the latest greatest games. As far as music goes, I feel that hip hop has been popular for the 2k decade. It's all about over-abusing hip hop to the point its not hip hop anymore, but garbage rapping about the stupidest things that I could create in the matter of a minute...I could just walk down the street and rap about what i'm wearing and how i'm walking and how cool i am for walking down the street....but who wants to hear that? not me!! What happened to the expiremental hip hop from the 80s? or the good gangsta' rap of the 90s? now its just about rapping about how much money you have and your image not talent....) Another thing I noticed that IS cool about this decade is that they are coming back w/ a lot of the 80s things, like toys, etc.

Although there are many changes in the past 5-6 years I think there should be something soon that will catapult us into a different age like futuristic cars, etc. We are already starting. I'm excited to see where things will go in 2010-2020.
I apologize to anyone who reads this and gets confused...i tend to type free flow and just let things out as they come to my head.
So I guess another thing I just realized too is that I'm almost 30......CRAZY! I don't feel like i'm 27 and I certainly don't act like i'm 27. I'm not disappointed in my silly attitude because that's just me, but I always think it's funny when I tell people i'm 27 and they're really surprised...they think i'm 21. Thanks! I remember when I was 16 being told I looked like I was 21 which I was proud of then too! Funny how things reverse. I'm still keeping my youthful looks....maybe its due to me always laughing...who knows! As stressful as being away from friends, family and loved ones while going to Full Sail, I still find time to laugh and goof around, either just making myself laugh while working on my projects (most likely because I have gone crazy from staring at the screen for so long) or just enjoying the company of my friends.

So I guess I will rap this up since the movie finished and I have to find another 80s movie to put in...maybe i'll watch the Wizard or TMNT. I hope that you enjoyed reading this somewhat and I will be posting some pics and such online soon. My schedule has been crazy this month and it's a lot of work...plus i've been procrastinating too which doesn't help, but I should be good to go for tomorrow = ) When i'm done w/ the class i'll post a screen shot of my duck and show you the amount of code it takes to create such a simple little duck. its crazy!

Well I hope everyone has a good day, don't be afraid to chat with me online or call whenever, if I don't answer, please leave a message. Take Care