Week 2 Cowbody

This screenshot was taken when the main frame of the body was formed, that is using a rectangular cuboid, then extruding the legs then the hands from the right points. This step was extremely straight forward.

This screenshot was taken right after I extruded some of the faces of the stomach and back to give the shape of the real cow body. However, I realised that the points were still quite rough and decided to use vertex points to make it more sharp in terms of quality.

This part of the exercise was focused on making the hooves for the cow and it was pretty easy. By extruding from the face of the bottom of the foot, it forms a rectangular base then we need to extrude once again to form the front 'ramp'.

This was after the neck has been formed. This part is probably the most important considering the fact that the head has to sit comfortably on the neck later, so it has to be formed well. Firstly, the hole on the neck has to be deleted through faces. Then using vertices, I extruded the neck upwards then repeat the process till it seems perfect.

One of the final parts of this exercise was the hands. Here there is nothing more than more extrusion to form the perfect fingers and thumb, though I think mine could have been improved if given another chance.

This is the final product of the cow body. As you can see, the body details have become more smoother. The reason is because the Polygons have been changed to Subdivs. The head has also been properly fit into the neck joint which is very important. In all, this advertisement will help greatly during the pre process of making an animation, which is the modelling component.

Week 5 Animation

ANIMATION

The three important factors that you need to look out for in animation are KEYFRAME, TIMING and CURVE.

Keyframe: To mark the keyframes you plan to do in your animation

Timing: To time the movement, we must firstly understand the motion of the movement and the rig itself.

Curve: Upon deciding on the timing of the animation, we must ensure that factors such as anticipation, stretch and squash and easing in and out are taken into consideration. For an example, a bouncing ball will eventually slow down so the animator has to plan the curve based on the motion of the ball.

Week 2 Human poses

In this lesson, we were supposed to download a human rig from a certain website link that was given to us in class, then position the rig according to the poses in the pictures the teacher asked us to follow.

1st pose (actual picture)

1st pose (Human rig)

As for this pose, I found it quite easy to open the jaws, close the fingers and bring the hand closer to the chest. However, I spent a huge chunk of this exercise trying to perfect the eyebrows, especially since I failed to achieve it in my first attempt.

2nd pose (actual picture)

2nd pose (Human rig)

This pose was much harder than the 1st because of the arm area. It was hard to maintain the original size of the arm as I enabled the Arm Stretch node to enable the arm to touch the ground. Other than that, the only other hard part was reducing the size of the rig's eyes as the 2nd pose shows the model with a look as such. Fun exercise in all!

Week 2 Spiderman poses

This week, we learned how to place models into various poses which was very fun. So for the first exercise, we used a Spiderman rig to pose. Here are my poses, enjoy!

This was the pose that we were supposed to duplicate using the Spiderman rig.

This was the rendered image of the pose shown above. It was pretty hard at first since this was our first time posing a character model. It was fun to learn how the position of the joints affect the rig totally.

This is a pose of Spiderman on the ground ready to shoot his web at a certain location and grab it before flying. Here, I learnt the positioning and adjustments you can make to the character's fingers to represent his/her qualities.

This pose was my personal favourite as it shows exactly how Spiderman prepares his jump before being airborne then shooting his web to fly. In this pose, I faced initial problems, not with the rig, but with the pose. Mainly because, I had to pose him in a way whereby the stretch and tension is visible in his legs as he times his jump. I also had to adjust his three spinal joints in a way that portrays him as squatting and preparing for a jump. Awesome exercise in conclusion!

Week 1 Cowhead

This screenshot was taken right after the basic shape of the cowhead was done.

I experienced initial problems when editing the vertex points of the frontal area of the head.

However, I managed to get my problems solved eventually with ease when I read through the

tutorials once again.

This screenshot was taken right after the right eye was done. Deleting the faces were easy and done with ease.

This screenshot was taken right after the right ear was done. I felt that this technique was very useful since this form of ears will be used for most animal models, if we do any in the future.

This screenshot was taken just before deleting the left symmetrical side of faces and doing Mirror Geometry. I found this part of the exercise EXTREMELY useful since we will be doing a similar step for our project model at the end of the term. Besides, now I will be able to do some character modelling with ease during my free time.

This is my final rendered image of the cow head after various steps such as smoothening. I really enjoyed this exercise as it introduced many new techniques that would enhance my level of understanding of Maya so as to improve my further projects. Lastly, I really appreciate this tutorial because of the last step, the Mirror Geometry tool. However, I encountered a minor problem upon using the Mirror Geometry tool. Upon pressing the tool button, the 'eye-holes' closed. I had to change it from Object to Faces mode to delete the unnecessary faces. Other than that, every part of the tutorial went smoothly. Loved this exercise!