Project 4 – Sketch Guy

DART303 3D, Final, Project 4, Uncategorized

Project 4 Final

Posted on December 15, 2021 by gxs481

I was able to place the worm in the scene and have it follow a different path than I originally planned. I felt that this obtuse looking monstrosity should not steal the spotlight of my playblast, so I had the worm appear onstage entirely at the end of the movie as a small jumpscare.

So as you can see, I stuck mostly with my original plan, excluding the main event. The motion of the camera I felt was pretty nice and definitely invoked the idea of having the audience be the character in the scene. Now instead of a Jaws-themed creepy video, I just have a camera lost in the desert, sweeping through the landscape to take in his surroundings until at the end his large mechanical worm friend shows up to say hello.

For the rendered image, my computer was essentially on its last legs and would not go for a full on render of a large image, so I had to do an IPR and save then export that image generated. I fiddled with it in photoshop so that the colors would come through, but ultimately it is nothing I am too proud to have. I think that I did end up learning a lot about rigging objects in Maya, even though I don’t have anything that I am happy to have as a final product for my rig. I did play around in Blender before starting this class, and maybe I will revisit that software with the knowledge I have now since Blender is free and more user friendly from what I gather.

Bib:

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

DART303 3D, Iteration, Project 4

Project 4 Iteration

Posted on December 15, 2021 by gxs481

So, here we are now. In total I have designed 3 different worms, each trying to implement a new type of rig into the body.

In the first one I went all out in designing and piecing together my worm by its sections. I wanted to go for a more skeletal style of worm that would appear very ominous. However I ran into a problem, my rig was not properly sticking onto the body or controllers of my worm. Things were exploding and pieces were flying all over the place, evidently processing too much information for each point. I learned later that this was likely because of how my body was put together using combines, instead of booleans. The system still doesn’t fully recognize the worm as one object and so attaching a rig to it is not straightforward. So I abandoned this worm and tried a second option.

The second worm I made again trying to utilize booleans and combines in tandem in order to mitigate some of the problems. I tried the same rigging system on the next one since it provided the most freedom of use. This rig consisted of joints with cluster handles that would influence other joints realistically when one joint is adjusted. I again went for the skeletal design, but decided to make it longer and leaner, furthering the spooky factor. But alas, the same problems arose, and I found I was not properly deleting history and freezing adjustments to reset the parameters to 0 on the object options.

Third try this time. I decided to tone down the design factor and focus on the rigging specifically. I again went for joints, but instead of doing cluster handles, I tried parenting the joints to each controller so that everything would stick together and move fluidly along a motion path. However the same problems continued arising. Things exploded, things being left behind, and now the worm was not properly attaching to the path, instead of straight-on it was sliding along like a skateboarder grinding a railing.

My last attempt at this was simply to make a mechanical sausage and string it along a path, disregarding any kind of fluid motion, I figured it was best to have something moving in the final video than not at all so this is what I ended up with.

This will be the final thing that roams the desert.

Bib:

Concept, DART303 3D, Project 4

Project 4 Concept

Posted on December 15, 2021 by gxs481

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: