Working on the Minister of Silly Walk Cycle

I'm not sure how much of an actual walk cycle this is gonna turn out to be, mainly because I have little sense of depth and perspective and what is supposed to move where when. I just don't get it sometimes.

But I did get the basics for the animation thing.

Yay me.

Here are some screenshots for your enjoyment.

It's my favorite pose. ^_^

References for Two Walk Cycles

Okay so along with just the normal walk cycle, I'm doing two more. One is from The Ministry of Silly Walks, and I haven't decided on the other one yet. I'm really tempted to just have the last one either be the pizza god dance, the single lady Obama on a spinning pizza in space, or just have the character rolling around on the ground like Draco Malfoy.

:3

They would all be very interesting...

Anyways, here is the reference I will be using for the Ministry of Silly Walks walk cycle.

Video reference for the Ministry of Silly Walks. There seem to be a lot of tweaked versions of this walk, so I'm going to do my best to recreate it with what I have to work with. I don't know if I want to use the freaky blue alien dude or just find a rigged character on the interwebs. And I'm still torn on the last walk cycle...

Creating a Walk Cycle in Maya

The next set of tutorials is over how to create a walk cycle in Maya. Like the title of this post says.

I'm so smart that sometimes I think I'm pretty dumb.

Also, I'm just gonna lump all the videos and screenshots into this one post because I don't want a multi-million post blog again.

^_^

And I'm pretty much done. There are a couple of videos left, but nothing on the actual animation of the walk cycle. So. Yeah. I'll watch those later. But hey! I'm done!!

Only two more different walk cycles to go!

Intro to Rigging in Maya Images

Same as with the post for the videos, I don't feel like spamming my own blog with uber long posts for a video lesson that is only a couple of minutes long. And besides that, it's learning how to rig for animation. Not really much that I can actually show through photos, huh?

 These are from lessons seven and eight. The image on the top shows how much I was messing it up by not clicking on the right things in the right order and the image on the bottom is how it looked when I did do everything in the right order.

These were from lessons eleven, twelve, and thirteen, attaching controls to the legs so that everything moves nicely and putting an IK handle on the tail.

Lesson fourteen was about learning the significance of groups in Maya, something that I already knew thanks to the Beginner's Guide to Rigging in Maya and all the modeling tutorials/projects that I have done. But it was nice to go over everything again.

Lesson eighteen was all about the aim constraint, learning that it's possible to control basically every single minute thing in Maya. Fun for control freaks.

 Lesson twenty-one was about the nodes and utilizing Maya's Node Editor. It was cool to see that there is some kind of science-y looking stuff in Maya.

Speaking of science-y stuff...

Adding a muscle jiggle. It was funny. 

Painting weights. Something I don't quite understand or want.

And then can we just pause and take a moment to appreciate the fact that he doesn't know how to spell the word 'smirk'...

Intro to Rigging in Maya Videos

Okay, so I've decided that instead of doing a new post for every set of videos after I've completed a certain number of lessons, I'm just going to add on to this one. Sure, it makes for a long post, but it keeps my directory over on the sidebar there from getting too full with all these posts. If you think this is a strange idea and that I should just post out the wahzoo...I suggest you go take a look at my first blog that I had to do for academic reasons. SO. MANY. POSTS. You can find that here.

And thus concludes the Introduction to Rigging in Maya.

Beginner's Guide to Rigging in Maya Videos

These are videos of what I accomplished in the Beginner's Guide to Rigging in Maya session tutorials.

Beginner's Guide to Rigging in Maya Pt 2 (Notes)

Okay. Heyhihello!! I'm just gonna pick up where I left off last night. 'Bout that time, eh chaps? ...right-o.

This next bit is about joints. Now I already mentioned a bit about joints in last night's post, so forgive me if I repeat myself a bit. 

To put in a joint, you have to be in the 'Animation' option of the drop down menu in the upper left hand corner of Maya. Then from the top bar, choose 'Skeleton' then the 'Joint Tool'. 

It's not a good idea to draw joints in the perspective view. You won't like the results and then chaos will ensue. As we create joints, it automatically creates a hierarchy for us. Two joints parented together creates a bone in-between. Instead of drawing joints in the perspective view, try using the top view. I think you'll get slightly less frustrated at everything mechanical that way. 

After Delano spent a lot of time telling me all the different ways to do this, it only took me like five seconds to create the joints at the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and middle fingertip of this bionic arm. 

By default, the arm rig is not placed within the arm, but on the base of the grid. To fix this, select the root joint (shoulder joint) and hit the Move hotkey, moving that little pest on up into the arm model. If you, like Delano, get really paranoid because you can't see the joints for the model, click Shading and then select X-Ray Joints from the drop down menu. 

After that's all said and done, you want to use the parenting tool that I mentioned in my last post and parent the hand to the hand bone, forearm to the forearm bone, upper arm to the upper arm bone...rather simple, really. 

Keep in mind that maintaining an organized and clean outline (Window > Outline) will make this project so much easier. Rename things so you know what you've got. 

To understand Inverse Kinematics (IK), we first need to understand what Forward Kinematics (FK) is. 

Basically, FK is just the movement of the bionic arm bending at the elbow. IK is going to work the same way because it deals with the rotation of the bones, but so that we'll get an inverse motion. 

Go to Animation > Skeleton > IK Handle tool. 'RP' stands for Rotate Plane and choosing this allows us to get elbow functionality. To create an IK Handle on an arm, go from upper arm to wrist while a leg would go from thigh to ankle. 

And it turns purple. That's cute.

Things can kind of get confusing at this point. Delano was able to do IK Handles with just a couple of clicks. It took me a couple of minutes to get it. But I think I got it the way he wants it...so....

Switching over to the Move tool, select the wrist's IK Handle and move it around. The arm then moves around with it, as it would on a human.

Delano makes the point that if the character needs to plant his hand on something but the character's upper body is still moving around - that hand needs to stay still. IK allows this to be possible. FK doesn't. 

FK is great for walk cycles. 

-evil grin- That's all two videos, less than fifteen minutes of film time. And look at all the notes I give. Look at them, Anikin. Look. :3 Okay, only four more videos to go. This next one is the longest out of the remaining four.

A control object is essentially an object that controls another, mainly for animation. NURBS curves are used quite often for controls because they're non-renderable. Make sure that the control object is going to be easy to select for the animator. Okay, now we have to snap it over to the wrist geometry. Easy way to do this is Show > hide polygons. Holding down the 'V' key makes things snappy. :3 

To clean up this control, we have to make sure that all the values in the translation are zero. To do this without moving the control object, select the object then select Modify > Freeze Transformations. Now all the attributes are nice and clean, which is good and panic-less. But our input isn't clean. Or nice. It's rather rude, really. It's good to clean up the inputs so that animation errors can be avoided. To do this, select Edit > Delete By Type > History. It's a wonderful thing and will probably make your machine run harder, better, faster, stronger. 

Instead of using parenting to get the control object to actually control something, we'll use this thing called constraint. Select the parent then the child (which is the opposite of parenting where you select the child first and then the parent object), then hit 'Shift' while selecting the wrist IK Handle. Then under the Animation menu, select constraint. Ta-da! Pretty. 

Now to move away from this lovely bionic arm and on to a slightly freaky blue alien arm, the next thing is a process called skinning. Sounds absolutely terrifying. But in Maya, skinning is another form of parenting, but on the component level. If you're on a Windows keyboard, then 'F8' will get you to component mode. Otherwise...I'm not sure what the Mac 'F8' is capable of other than playing/pausing iTunes... Sorry about that. Once in component mode (Macs hold down 'fn' and hit 'F8'), we see little purple dot things. These are vertices. They can either be your best friend, or your mortal enemy. These vertices control what happens to the actual mesh of the model, changing the shape, deforming it, etc. 

With skinning, it's the same thing, basically. But the movement is going to be controlled by joints, or what is called influence objects. Skinning is, essentially, parenting these vertices to the bones or whatever influence objects we have influencing the mesh. 

Through a series of things that definitely didn't work and recruiting Stephanie's help, we finally have bending at the elbow. Stupid skinning. Why you no work like Delano said?

What you were supposed to do was select the arm mesh, then Shift select the first two arm joints, which I couldn't do. I have no idea why. Anyways, then you were supposed to go to Skin > Bind Skin > Smooth Skin, but Stephanie did it some other way and it worked. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

Now that I have a vague understanding of skinning, I get to learn about editing skin deformations. Select the mesh that has been deformed, then Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Paint Skin Weights tool. 

Well I've reached the end of my classtime and I do not want to get mauled by little freshmen...so I'm gonna stop here. I've got less than ten minutes of film time left so I'm gonna watch that on my own time but I won't be putting anything about it on here. The next post will be little videos of the things I've accomplished in this lesson. 

Beginner's Guide to Rigging in Maya Pt 1 (Notes)

Allllrighty then. :] Heyhihello! I don't have my Digital Tutors activation code as of yet sooooo all I can really do is watch the tutorial videos and take notes.

What is rigging? Rigging is building controls to manipulate objects. Why would we need rigging? The character needs to be able to move around. Rigging can be as basic as squishing a jello-like cube into something similar to a fat pancake. 

What is parenting? Parenting is a way of having one object fully controlled by another object. With parenting, we essentially create a parent-child relationship between our objects. This means that the child will always follow it's parent. Unless it is a stubborn and/or rebellious child. Then we might have a problem. To do this 'parenting' thing, you select the object that you want to be the child, then shift-select the object that has been deemed the previously mentioned object's parent. Then you press the 'P' key, which is Maya's hotkey to parent. If you select the parent of the two objects, you can control both but you still have complete control over the child by simply selecting the child object. 

 'Z' is Maya's hotkey to undo something. :3 

Head over to Window then Outliner to view the hierarchy of the objects. The little plus signs (+) mean that there is something that has been parented to that object. And now for un-parenting! Mwuahahaha. All you have to do is select the object that you want to un-parent (that sounds cruel), and then hit Shift-'P' and viola, you now have an orphan object. 

We want the forearm to pivot from the elbow, not the center of the forearm. Arms just don't work like that. 

The 'W' is Maya's hotkey for the Move tool, and the 'E' and 'R' keys are hotkeys for the Rotate and Scale tools, respectively. The '4' key makes things clearer, turning the object from shaded grey mode to wireframe "there-are-too-many-lines-now-so-it's-a-good-time-to-panic" mode. 

The whole knowing how to change the pivot point is really actually pretty basic...but it's also really very important in the rigging business of things. 

To center a pivot point, all you have to do is click on the Modify tab and go down to Center Pivot. Simple enough.

According to...Delano...hm...the best way to put the pivot where you want it is doing so by hand via an extremely complex computer program. So basically you just hold down the Insert key...which unfortunately the Mac keyboard does NOT have...soooooo I'm sorry I don't really know what the Insert key on the Mac keyboard is. :[ Anyways, all you have to do is allegedly hold down this mysterious Insert key, and then move the pivot in the x- and z-axis. To confirm this, you have to hit the Insert key again. Of course, the best view to do so in would be the top view, which you can attain by hitting the 'space' (the final frontier) bar and then choosing the view that says TOP on it. 

The '5' key switches from that panicky wireframe mode to the easy-on-the-eyes shaded mode.

Whew. That's a lot of notes. And I'm only 4 videos into this hour-long tutorial session! :3

Groups are great for organizing a multi-object scene, like an urban environment or a murder scene. Pressing Control-'G', or in my case Command-'G' (Maya's hotkey to - you guessed it - create a group), creates a group of whatever objects that you had selected. Groups help simplify our scene, making it less cluttered and a whole lot less panicky. Oh and it also grants a bit of clarity and quick access to things. 

Now the best way to imagine how an arm joint would work would be to think of your own body. We can actually create an entire skeleton that is made up of Mayan joints and bones that can be placed inside of a modeled character so that the character can be used for animation purposes. 

Okay folks well I'm gonna stop for now and pick back up afternoon. I'm on video tutorial number 6 of 11 video-lesson. :]

Who's on First

I am. I think. Regardless of who's on first, this is a blog to keep track of my 3D Modeling/Animation II class at Oklahoma Christian University. Hooray. And I'm also posting this so I can see what my posts are going to look like so I can fiddle around with the layout and design of this site. :]