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These are from foundational classes at SCAD. I think I’ve gotten a bit better at drawing faces since the last time I posted here. 

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So, It’s been a minute since I’ve posted anything. By a minutes, I mean more like a few years. But recently, I realized the importance of having a place to show projects and keep track of progress. So here’s an unfinished project I was working on a little while back. 

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Ok, I’m making progress making the landscape for the map while also learning more about UV’s and textures. Word of advice, use the cloud filter in photoshop, it’s useful for a lot of textures. 

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Root Joint

Don’t forget to always have a root joint at 0,0 for all your rigs that everything else can be parented to . 

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Fish Rig

After a lot of trial and error following a slightly dated tutorial here's a list of things to remember when rigging  fish, or anything with IK.

This rig is created by creating a SINE deformer creating a wavelength that the joints deform along.  

How to make Sine fish rig: 1. Create spine 2. Make sure there's a root joint (so that the rotations and deformations move around the center of the model. 3.  Create IK SPLINE curve 4. Move a control vertex on the spline curve to make sure it's working correctly. If it's working correctly the joints should calculate rotation values based on the deformation of the control vertex. 5. Create a SINE deformer and orient it with the joint spine. 6. select the SINE handle and go into its inputs, where you make the drop off 0, Low Bound -2, and Highbound 0. 7. From there snap the SINE curve to the last joint of the spine and rotate it back around to the spine. (This creates the backward flow of a fish movement.

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Rigging to Animation?

The dilemma of my life recently has been trying to pursue animation while still being useful in my game development team. I want to practice breathing life into inanimate objects and doing complicated expressive walk cycles, but our game doesn't need that. Even if our game did require animated, expressive walk cycles and cut scenes, I wouldn't be able to help much because of my rigging abilities are pretty good, they're not good enough to make a fantastic animation. So to work on animation... Eventually... For the time being, I have to work on rigging to be able to animate something.  Either way, I feel like I'm moving the wrong direction, but I don't know what else I can do to both further my progress in animation and help my team. Either way, I'm getting pretty good at rigging.

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Here’s my first attempt at the trule swimming animation. Fun fact! Sea turtles swim with both front fins at the same time, while fresh water turtles alternate their legs swimming.

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Rock drawing from previous post!

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Bump maps

This is my totally not worried about my grade panic extra math study...

 I was Drawing a rock the other day and wasn’t sure how to make it look rough with a pen. Then I started to wonder the same thing about models which brought me back around to normal and texture maps.  How do you make a surface look rough?

– Option 1: model the surface with many small polygons

 – Option 2: edit the normal vectors before the shading calculation

 • the surface doesn’t actually change, but shading makes it look that way 

• bump map fakes small displacements above or below the true surface 

• can use texture-mapping for this and with a fraction of the processing power i takes to run with a super high poly model.

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The Real Reason my Blog is Late (Math)

So I was going to have all these posts done last friday with all the UI and math, but I was too busy dealing with the sideways cow animation. Long story short after a lot of trial and error importing my animations (like always), we got the cow mesh WITH the skeleton and the animation imported separately into unreal. Everything seemed like it was going fine, when all of a sudden we play the animation in unreal and the cow is sideways..... It turns out that in Unreal the up axis is Z while in Maya the up axis is Y and there’s a tiny checkbox in the fbx export settings that changes the axis that we had to find. 

so... NOTE TO ANYONE STRUGGLING EXPORTING ANIMATIONS INTO UE4 FROM MAYA:

DON'T FORGET TO...

1. Select the root joint AND the mesh and bake the animation to the mesh with the setting BELOW turned on rather than selected.

2. Select the root joint and export selected with constraints and bake animation turned ON.

3. Up Axis Z

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I forgot to mention that I’ve been doing A LOT of UI the past 10 weeks. Almost all of it was made in illustrator with the pen tool. Using bezier curves, I can make decent line art out of a sketch done on paper that has smooth line art. I forgot to blog about it until now because it seems like the UI will never get incorporated into the game... It’s not a priority, so people usually don't feel the need to add a tutorial or anyway on how to actually play the game...

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Actually practicing the golden ratio! Until now I “understood” the golden ratio, but never really knew how to use it within my art. But, after reading a book on character design and art I finally understood the golden ratio and decided to work on a piece based on a picture, but using the new advice I learned to make it better! The first thing I made sure of was that the character was on a 3rd of the canvas. The second was to make sure that the focal point, her face, was where the golden rule spiral was focused. The only problem that remained was that her body was a similar size to her bike rather than following the 1/3 2/3′s rule of proportion. So I sized the bike down a little bit, I still think it needs to be sized down more, but it’s better than the original 1/2 and 1/2. 

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Baking Animations? (math-ish)

After almost two years of baking animations I never really new what I was actually doing when I baked an animation. I had the basic concept that a keyframe was added to every controller curve for every frame.

After some research I learned that when you have an animation that need to create the next frame in relation to the previous frame, you then “bake” the animation so that every movement that was modified or produced by your animation, becomes keyframes. So basically what I said earlier with better words to describe it. However I did learn that baking the animations cuts the calculation time down making it faster and easier to work with in Unreal. 

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While animating the house I decided to incorporate one of the key principles of animation, anticipation, and how I can manipulate bezier curves in order to create anticipation. I learned that the animation curve has to have a very small slope leading up to a drastic movement, which can be shown almost as a plateau before a dramatic parabola. 

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To find out more about the castle game...

https://trello.com/b/BuvC0OAh/toy-castle-game

There’s a link to out trello board where we recently started to incorporate daily updates, mainly for the purpose of keeping up with our programer Josh. Since he’s in the afternoon class keeping in contact and figuring out what he’s doing has been a challenge, so the daily updates are a way for all of us to see what we’re working on. 

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I’m still working on the bike girl digital painting, but after working several hours straight with an outcome I”m not very proud of I’ve become frustrated and might wait a little while before resuming work on this project. 

Back to the table top project, we’ve decided that the moving windmill is lonely. My mission is to make most of the elements on each side of the castle have some movement reaction to being hit by a projectile.  I built a pretty basic rig for the first small house, and animating it was enjoyable! I used the animation rule of hesitation to make the silly shaking response more pleasing. However, it wasn’t an excellent idea to have all of the village models, rigs, and animations on one Maya file. While working on the second barn animation, one of the house controllers became visible, and I assumed it was a mistake and deleted it deleting the house animation... But I have both the house and the animation exported as FBX files, so I think I can save that animation. 

Lastly, I started rigging my cow for the game. The cow took a lot of trial and error to get the rig working. The biggest problem I had was finding the difference between constraining the controllers to the rig vs parenting the controllers to the rig. 

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Gam jam didn’t quite turn out the way I thought it would. Similar to last year programing fell through last minute. The biggest issue we had was using the SVN with Unity. All the aspects of the game worked separately but once things started coming together things started breaking and we only had one computer that the game could be modified from. I’m slightly inspired to go out and learn programing myself so I don’t have to rely on others for any aspect for projects, but I’ve been trying to be more of a team player lately. I’ll continue to work on art and leave my very small faith in programers alone for now. 

I was worried about taking the role of art director, thinking people wouldn’t listen to me, or go over my head. But it worked out well. I was able to organize and keep my artists working. I did find out that as an art director you don’t get a lot of your work done because you're always making sure that your artists have things to work on, are using a consistent style, and are saving and exporting everything the right way. My job was to help and be flexible, an if that means designing UI and menus, that’s fine by me.