New 2D Maya rigged character and ready for animating.

Variation Skins for Generic Male Maya Rig

I am starting to work on some variations to the Kill Bill styled character. These will take two forms. The first will be hand drawn pen and ink; plenty of cross hatching, on water colour paper and scanned.

The other will be collage based. I want to do some thing using the old Spode Willow Plate patterns that were created near the University in the 1700's.

Spode Willow plate - 1700's

Spode Pottery Willow Pattern rough test

Then some collage pieces using old etchings from Piranesi...

Giovanni Piranesi etching rough test

...and any other interesting etchings I can find...

Etching of foliage test

Improved uv unwrapping / textures for the Kill Bill / Bruce Lee styled generic male character...

Improved uv unwrapping for the Kill Bill / Bruce Lee styled generic male character...

The uv for this was a bit hit & miss before.

This week the students get to have a go so I have tidied it up prior to them getting their hands on it.

uv / texturing  work in progress

When it is finished this rig will be available for download for anyone who wants to give it a go, with a choice of textures!

Kill Bill / Bruce Lee inspired costume for the Generic Male animation fundamentals rig.

Got the Generic Male rig finished with Autodesk Maya and HumanIK. The first year animation students have been using it for Animation Principles this semester. Seems to behave itself overall.

Now adding textures.

The first one is a Kill Bill / Bruce Lee inspired costume.

 I included a blood splattered version for a laugh!

Students will get to make this character using Maya after Christmas as part of our Sculpture for Animation module, then rig it as well in HumanIK. 

Looking forward to that, should be a laugh (famous last words if ever I heard them)!

I am planning more textures soon, time permitting.

New low poly human model ready for rigging with HumanIK.

This is a simple low-poly Maya model for level 4 Animation students to experiment animating with in September, then model themselves.

Modelling is pretty much done. Time to rig with HumanIK.

Some actual animation!!!

Time to put some life into this...thing.

Below is the Mental Ray look; took three hours and made my lap-top do an impression of a George Foreman grill, and that was without knocking the background out of focus. So I did the Mental Ray movie render (only 80 frames of animation) on some of the Uni machines last week.

Mental Ray rendered version.

Below is a render using software. Still looks pretty good, and I can see the animation but it really lacks the beams of light turning in the background.

Software Version

Nothing fancy, just straight ahead animation and I have not played with the curves via the graph editor yet.

Looking at the lighting in the Mental Ray version the beams are more distracting than expected so I am going to slow them down a lot and make them less visible.

More soon, including the guy with the big hands!!

Big Damn Hands baby!!!

In a moment of madness I dusted down the old Diesel Robots mechanical hands and gave them to the Mark II robot; Massive Holographic hands with Thirty Eight working pistons!!!

I never got them rigged before so it is great to have them done at last.

Big Damn Hands baby!!!

[Yes, I know its ironic that a robot with no actual working joints has half visible magic hands that have tons of working pistons that they do not need (because they are holographic hands).]

But hey, that's just artistic license!!! And it looks great. Mind you, the five 1/2 hour render time for one frame is a bit steep. The laptops fan sounded like it was going to take off. I may have to try our chunky PC's in the green-screen room for this one.

Rigged Pistons galore!

Multi-plane animation using Maya 2016

Two things that are always popular on the Animation Award are silhouettes and multi-plane animation; often a combination of the two. When ever students are introduced to using silhouettes for character design they tend to keep using this invaluable process for the rest or their time with us, often animating the results.

Th next logical step is multi-plane animation of the silhouettes to give some depth. The work of German film director Lotte Reiniger still has a powerful impact on people when they see it for the first time and represents some of the best silhouette animation you will ever see.

"The Adventures of Prince Ahmed" by L. Reiniger

Several games have been created with this look over recent years, the most memorable being the award winning 'Limbo' by Playdead & Double Eleven in 2010.

The game 'Limbo'.

To create their own rigs students have often built their own multi-plane rigs with panes of glass and wood, etc. The film by Nancy Lee-Overton below is a great example.

'Into the Trees' by Nancy Lee Overton.

https://vimeo.com/96140400

These rigs can be time consuming to build and notoriously difficult to light due to the reflection and shadows created by the rig itself.

A multi-plane rig.

A horizontal rig made by the Fleischer Studio.

So I have found a way of doing this quickly in Maya by utilising the Alpha channel to give the impression of intricate cut-out puppets from very basic geometry.

Rigged silhouette machine.

This is not to replace multi-plane animation; just to make it more feasible at a student level, particularly for students not comfortable building wood and glass rigs.

Flat polygon planes are used to build the shape.

The true geometry!

The Alpha channel on the texture makes the white areas invisible...

Final look.

The model without texture.

The parts sheet used to texture the machine.

Side view of construction.

Its Alive!!!

I call him MKII, but he answers to 'Blinky'!

The first movement test of the HumanIK rigged Mark II robot head, with additional facial / head bones.

Diesel Update #11; New Loader Robot side view

This is the third robot. Made partly from other robots bits, this one started as a rig, to which I am attaching the geometry.

It has two pairs of arms, but the smaller ones are barely visible as they are unfinished.

Should be fun to animate.

Diesel update #10

Rigging begins for the Stalker robot.