Week 3

During week three we had our first tutorial in basic rigging in the software. This session was for use to be able to understand the basics of creating the start rig for a pair of legs.
We started by creating a basic joint and bone structor using the joint tool. We snapped a joint to the grid on a side view point on maya this was the top of the leg. We next created the knee by snapping a joint to the grid below the top joint. When a secondary joint is created maya joints these joints together with bone. This bone is in the shape of a triangle pointing the direction of the joint. We kept creating joints that related to joints in a leg which included ankle, ball of the foot and the toe. These were all connected with bones. With this we had a basic joint structor for rigging a leg.

Screenshot:


We next had to change the XYZ axis of the knee joint due to the face the Y was pointing in the wrong direction to the bend of the joint. If we were to carry on without changing this axis then the knee would bend the wrong way when trying to animate or the joint.


I also created a basic model for the bomb idea i had for my animation. This is the basic model i made using a 3 different objects in maya. I firstly started by creating a basic sphere in which would be the sphere for the animation. I next created a cylinder that i had to transform into the correct size for the rim of the model. I next created another cylinder that i would used for the fuse for the model. I spilt the sphere into two sides meaning that it would be able to open for my animation. I hit a problem during the creating of this basic model and that was the idea of my animation, i would have to find out a way of creating a realistic fuse, this men’t that i would have to make it appear to have gravity and freedom to move. I thought that creating joints in the fuse it would be able to bend and appear to flop round if the model rolls onto the scene. Unfortunately i also thought that to create a good animation i had to create both a burn effect and have a way of making the fuse disappearing within the animation. My first thoughts were to when the model fuse is men’t to burn away it would be pulled down into the model and hidden within the model as it splits but this seems both difficult and could ruin the look of the animation.

I also made a basic model of my fly idea:



This is my basic model:


Due to those problems i have chosen that i will create a new idea that would be thoroughly thought out and would be both animatable with my current skills and would be well modeled. My plan is to create some ideas and to roughly story board a couple seconds of animation. To do this we selected the joint and went onto orient joint options and changed the Y to -Y meaning it would change into the opposite way to what it was at.

We also learnt that when changing the names of the objects and joints in the hierarchy its important to follow a certain rule that would help us easily find the object you are looking for in large hierarchies. Also this method can help when the computer has to search for a object. By having the Object_Side_What it is you can easly find what you are after in a large hierarchy. An example is knee_R_joi.