Eye appear to be missing a head

So this week we had a crack at doing some eye rigging using the FFD ox. This is basically a box that will deform multiple mesh’s in exactly the same way without affecting the pivot point. This is useful for eyes as it means you can still close the eyelids when the mesh is deformed. Another benefit is found when using it in conjunction with the morpher tool, you can keep polygon count down if you order the stack correctly. Here is the explanation:

Consider a sphere with 18 segments, this will give you 288 polys (trust me), then you add a mesh smooth with one iteration, now you have 612 polys. If you deformed this, Max would have to deform 612 polys every frame. Now if you do it the other way round, deform the mesh then mesh smooth Max only needs to deform 288 polys and then smooth it, giving you the same result, making it render quickly.

Architecture – an insight in to the mentality

I have been looking in to the architecture of the Incas to see what sort of buildings I am going to need to create for my scene.

Although there are not many ‘speculative’ images out there as to what the Incas building and settlements really looked like, there is more than enough of it still standing to get a very good idea.

The villages tend to be high on mountain sides and made almost entirely of stone. The stone is likely to be for a couple of reasons.

1) Because they have it in abundance on mountains, more so than timber.

2) Being up so high it needs to be weather proof, which leads me on to the first character trait.

Why build so high up? Well I believe this could be because height gives an incredible defensive and offensive advantage against enemies and unwanted visitors. This would suggest they were both reclusive and hostile to outsiders at the same time, and possibly have many enemies. Secondly, the settlements that remain are all surrounded by strong stone walls, and lets face it walls are only built to keep things in or out. The possible reasons for this include (as well as the reasons mentioned above) that the want to keep their community in and other out so they are quite reclusive unless they have to be.

The second character trait I have is from research. The Incas were known to be strong proud peoples who valued their social status, both in their community and in tribal standings. They would often engage in fights with local tribes over land disputes and power issues, and they usually won. I believe this is reflected in their archaeology, strong tall building built in strong places with heavy fortification. The Inca Hanan was the top of the social chain, he would always be a strong proud warrior, someone who no other would dare challenge.They seem like a bit of a scary bunch, especially when trying to create an animation for children. For this reason I want to try and add some light heartedness to the Hanan but I am going to have the archaeologist to be the guided tour, he will keep the information factual but act as the Hanan’s opposite and keep the animation fun rather than a horror film. As I discussed in an earlier post about there always being two characters who together complete the requirements for a good animation, the archaeologist will be one of these people and the Hana the other, here is their traits:

Hanan
Traits: hero, big, strong, fearless, easily frustrated
Story attributes: Main story line, suspense, peril

Archaeologist
Traits: Small, easily amused, easily side tracked
Story attributes: Humor (unintentional), happy for the Hanan

Well, thats it for that reasearch for the moment, lots more to follow soon.

In case you’re interested the character is going well, I have some really well defined biceps.

Down the gym

My Inca character has been getting a bit of a work out lately. As this is intended to be my main character and form a major part of my show reel I want it to be really good, I mean REALLY REALLY good. For this reason I have begun adding detail to it today (for a lot of hours solid). Now, I have also modelled a head today, this blog is going to go through that too but it is stuck in the middle of the body detail stuff, stick with it and all will make sense by the end, I promise.

Here, as you can see I have got to the early stages of refining the mesh. Above I have begun to add pecs, ribs, abbs and even a belly button (I hope the detail comes out ok in this image). I did this working along the same Joan of arc tutorial as previously mentioned. Basically I have been adding extra polygons to the mesh and adjusting them to get the right look. It was a long process to get this far but I am confident that now that I am this far along I can begin to refine the figure much quicker.

So, on to the head part. I wanted a break from modelling the torso so I set about creating a head to sit atop the shoulders. I modelled the head in a similar fashion to what I learned last semester, using topology lines, I won’t bore you with the particulars of how to do this as we all did it last semester. I struggled to find reference images to use and went through trying to use a few different image but as they were not from the same face things just were not lining up,

I eventually just used the face on the reference planes i already had set up to model the body, I will adjust the features in the not to distant future to suit the character. On completion of the head after a fair few hours I went to attach it to the body and realised that I had forgotten to account for matching up the number of segments on the head to the neck, dam!

This head currently remains unattached. I spent hours modelling the dam thing and I don’t want to re-model it. I could have just removed segments but that causes the face to lose detail that I spent ages on, so I have come up with another solution. As part of my detail enhancement on the body I have to add segments to the arm to create proper biceps, when doing this I intend to match up the number of segments to the head and attach it before continuing on with probably more segments for the arms and pecs.

So this is the point I decided to move on to the biceps. The mans arms is currently in a cylinder pattern like so

After lots of looking at my own arms, arms on the net, and trying to look at small pictures of other peoples characters I discovered that this flow is wrong for human arms to be correct. The flow is in three distinct directions

1. The shoulder and arm muscles are separated by a vertical line that follows up from the chest,
2. A circle around the bicep helps to define the shape
3. A line under the muscle leads to the back of the elbow, (This is not my arm before you ask, random internet find)

this means I have had to completely rearrange the flow of polygons on my arm to even begin to get the right effect. Getting to this stage has taken for ever, when I began re arranging the flow directions it was starting to cause havoc on the chest as I was ending vertices in random places. However, I am beginning to get a logical flow to it and things are starting to look a lot smother.

Hopefully this shouldn’t take too long but the same is going to have to be done with the forearms and calves. What have I got my self in for?! I think the other characters will not be in nearly as much detail or I will never get round to animating.

Oh, one other thing that has become apparent, I have modelled my hands round the wrong way with the palms facing forward, they need to be facing down to easily accommodate a biped. When I do the forearms it looks like the muscle naturally twists in a direction that will allow me to rotate the hands gradually as I change the flow of forearm polygons.

Next week boys and girls, toe and finger nails, Oooooohhhh lucky you. Until then I am going to research character traits and finish the muscle definition in my character.

I have been working on my character all day extruding out the body and it has been going well. I still have a long way to go and the bode needs a lot of refinement but I now feel more confident that this should go well. I realise that my characters legs are a bit close together and may cause problems when skinning but there is a theory there. I have skinned a few characters in the past and had to mess around with vertex weights to be able to solve any issues that arise, there for it is easier to mess around with the vertex weights than it is to try and either change my reference image or model outside the reference image. And if all else fails and I can not successfully change the weighting then at least I will have learned something.

A king is born

Well I have started to model my Inca Hanan character and as you can see I have a leg, woohoo.
I have been following a rather in depth tutorial on how to model Joan of arc which can be found by clicking here or visiting ( http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/joanmenu.asp ). obviously I am not making Joan of arc but the principles are the same. The process so far started with a simple box as the foot. I then began extruding a single face of the box out to create the basic shape of the foot then up the leg. Once I had this I then began adding additional vertices to further refine the shape. For the toes I had to split the end of the foot in to 5 sections and extrude out them out slightly differently to normal. Here is how, First I had to move the vertices to ensure the faces that were going to be the toes were all facing away from each other, this was to ensure that max added different vertices for each toe and didn’t join any of them together (see below). Next I extruded the faces as individuals (and option in the extrude box) and finally moved all the toes back in to line.


The whole process of creating the leg took a little longer than I had planned because I got a bit precious about the detail. In particular the feet area, getting the shape of the ankles and the definition and correct sizes and shape for the toes. Normally the feet would not consist of so much detail, they would be in shoes with enough segments to deform properly when walking, but this guy is going to be bare foot and sitting up high on his throne so his feet may be quite visibly prominent for a while.

On with the work, I hope to get this guy done by the end of the week. His face will probably take the longest to animate as that is where his ‘character’ is going to come alive and convey the emotions.

Right, I am about ready to begin my character modelling. I have completed a basic walk cycle with a simple stair object in the middle to complicate it.



had thought about doing some more walk cycle tests before modelling the character but I came to the conclusion that I would probably find more errors if I had a skinned character. The theory is that while a rigid skeleton will throw up some issues that I can over come, a mesh will probably add a lot more and in solving one problem I may be creating another further down the line with the mesh on, so I’m going to create all the problems at once and fix them one by one.

The first character I am going to create is my Inca Hanan. He will be the most visible for the animation therefore must be the most detailed. Hopefully by creating the most detailed and complex model first the rest will be even easier (not that this is in any way going to be easy).

Here’s a thought, do you record vocals then try lip syncing the model to the vocals or get an actor to talk over an already animated model?

The Incas

I have decided to go with the Incas for my animation. They were a proud and strong race of people and I think that can be seen in the architecture that still stands on mountain sides to this day.

I sort of have a story board in my head as to the characters and story line which I will post in due course once I have drawn it out, or at least my attempt of a drawing. It will take place in the time of the Incas when their cities were in full glory. For the characters I am going to have three.

1) The first is a school boy that is being shown round the Incas city. He will play only a small role and I do not intend to do much in the way of character development for him, I may even go in to POV mode with him once he has been introduced.

2) Second is my first main character, he will be a kind of stereotypical archaeologist who will be showing the boy around and filling him with all the facts he needs to pass his GCSE’s. I have an idea of him being really short but full of confidence. I believe that by doing this he is at the children’s level but not scared of the big intimidating city. This should help children relate to him.

3) is the second main character, The Inca Hanan (Hanan translates to mean
High, ruler basically). He will be tall, strong and proud. I imagine him to rule over his people with power, when he asks for something it turns up five minuets ago. I am considering adding a comical element to him at the end, possibly campnes.

There is much to be done so I will take my leave until next time.

Some character / film analysis

I have been looking in to popular children’s animations and trying to analyse what makes the characters so popular and I have come up with an interesting discovery. More often than not there is more than one character and each character plays a certain emotional role. Let me explain. Take Shrek and Donkey, Shrek is the large, level headed hero while Donkey is the comical clumsy village idiot. Whilst there may be more than one character in the main cast, they can always fit in to one of two categories:

1) Hero / Big / Brute / Strong / Fearless / Easily frustrated / Metholodical

2) Weak / Small / Scared / Stupid / Simple / easily amused / random

With both of these elements you can include various factors in every film:

• Humour – the clumsy one can do something stupid
• Peril – adds suspense but we have the big/hero to save the day
• Side story’s – something a little different when the idiot gets sidetracked
• A main story – the hero/level head to keep the story moving forward
• Sadness – the hero’s reason to begin his quest through the film
• Happiness – the clumsy one is happy for the hero at the end of the film (and usual wins an added bonus prize for him/her self)

The method of using multiple characters for the range of emotions is clearly a tried, tested and proved method of creating children’s animations. For this reason I am not sure I feel comfortable questioning it, rather I have decided to embrace it (and let’s face it, arguing child psychology is a bit above and beyond the scope of this module).

For now anyway here is a little table I put together to support my theory,

No more questions your honour, I rest my case.