Category: Concept

Now comes for part two of this large project: Rigging our worm characters. Now at first I thought this would be fairly straightforward, and because I knew how I wanted my worm to behave, I thought getting the rig to fit into place would be simple.

I was very wrong.

But we will get to that later, first off here is how I originally imagined the worm to look like:

I admit it is very rudimentary, but that was the point. Not to get too fancy, in order to make sure the rigging actually fit correctly. I wanted a segmented worm with an open mouth, baring large pointed teeth. In my head I imagined I would make 2 unique sections of the worm. One large section to serve as the bulk of the body, and one small section to focus as the joints and movement points on the rig. From there I could just copy and paste these segments in alternation until achieving the desired length. From there I would taper the tail off, and manipulate the head to create the sharp teeth I was imagining.

I once again was aiming to stick closely to the exercise in order to not get to overzealous with my creations.

 

Bib:

Cromar, William. “Entitiesthreekindsofrig.” NewMediaWiki [Licensed for Non-Commercial Use Only] / EntitiesThreeKindsOfRig, http://newmediawiki.pbworks.com/w/page/127713090/entitiesThreeKindsOfRig.

This next project was actually just phase one of a two-phase project. Now that we have learned and utilized skills in precision modeling and 3d animation, it was time to fuse the two together. Whereas before we had only worked on objects, we will now focus on shaping a scene for our ‘story’ to take place. The ‘character’ of our scene would be some variation of simple worm that we will rig up in the second half of the project. With that in my mind I immediately thought of ‘Dune’, because I had just seen it the following weekend and was thoroughly pleased by the CGI implored in that film. It made me want to set my scene in a harsh desert environment, featuring a large worm of gargantuan proportions. We will see later how my vision manifested into reality, but first here is what I imagined the scene to be:

To further explain, the top image is a birds-eye view of the landscape. It will take place on a ‘flat’ disc, featuring 2 raised hills that will function as large sand dunes. The worm will start in the back of the shot, behind both dunes and will snake its way onto the view of the camera. The camera, acting as another character, will give the audience a sense of being in the film as the camera will emulate human movements, with it bobbing up and down to simulate walking. The camera is stationed on a platform which at this point, I imagine to be some sort of shipwreck in the middle of the desert. At the end of the film, the worm will consume the camera and the audience.

 

 

 

 

 

Bib:

Cromar, William. “Environmentspossibleworld01.” NewMediaWiki [Licensed for Non-Commercial Use Only] / environmentsPossibleWorld01, http://newmediawiki.pbworks.com/w/page/127695491/environmentsPossibleWorld01.

This next project we are working on requires us to create realistic objects and place them into a simple scene. This is a classic exercise in 3d modeling and is typical done by creating a tea set, chess set, still life, or some other small group of unique objects to occupy a ‘plate’, or ‘board’. For my project I decided to go with the chess set, since I like the style of the game and its pieces. Also I used to goof-off in my high school ceramics class by creating chess pieces instead of making a bowl or whatever dish-ware we were assigned to make.

My initial inspiration for my pieces actually comes from the previous exercise, “The Nine Square Grid” exercise. I decided I wanted my pieces all to be created from a similar vocabulary of 9 pillars arranged in a 3×3 grid, where the length and width of each column remains constant through each piece, but each of the pillars will be arranged in differing heights in order to convey their unique identities as chess pieces. Below are the initial sketchs.

 

 

You can see that I included a top-down orthographic view of each piece where in each square I label the expected height for each piece that I will create initially. From this point I will do some fine tuning to ensure that each piece feels wholly unique in its design. As of now I expect changes to be made to the pawn, knight, and rook in order to give them more personality.

 

Cromar, William. “Elementslookingglass.” NewMediaWiki [Licensed for Non-Commercial Use Only] / ElementsLookingGlass, 2021, http://newmediawiki.pbworks.com/w/page/127118741/elementsLookingGlass.

For our first project this semester, we were instructed to take a painting from Piet Mondrian, who is famous for creating very blocky and rectangular paintings, and transform it into a 3D version of itself. After creating the object, we then were asked to make the components of our piece animate themselves into forming the final piece. When I saw the example piece, I immediately thought of having my final piece utilize clockwork motion, meaning to say that pieces of my project would move in the motion and tempo of a clock.

With that in mind, I chose the painting I thought I could best use to utilize the clockwork motion I envisioned. The piece below is what I chose, and it stood out to me because of the excessive amounts of think black lines running across the canvas, those stuck out to me like the hands on a clock.

I visualized a quick sketch of how I would start making the piece.

With that, it was time to get sculpting. I first started by placing the painting into Maya in 2 orthographic views and sculpting against those pictures as my references. The large pieces went first and then I tackled the bars. The sculpting and placing was easy enough, but the problem was making sure a single piece could represent two pieces in two frames at the same time. This part involved a lot of strategic placements to hide an object on one side, but reveal it on the other.