Week 5- Force Trajectory

 

This sessions work looked at anticipating movements and how to add it into animation. For the Moom character lifting weights, it means him crouching down before lifting the weight and leaving his arms stretched longer to show that he is lifting something heavy. There are still some issues with the arm lengths and elbows as the arms are ever so slightly different in lengths.  

Maya - Lighting and Rendering 2 - Stand Ins (Proxies)

 Stand Ins, or Proxies, are an effective way to populate a render without slowing down the render view or the viewport. You can create a Stand in through a Arnold setting which results in a bounding box that represents the volume of your chosen object. You can then duplicate this box to create multiple versions of the same object. 

The viewport only shows the bounding box, which can sometimes hinder the process, for example, if the robot model faced a certain way you wouldn't be able to see where the robot is currently facing. A fix for this is using the viewport draw mode to insert a low res depiction of the object inside the box.

Final Render

Maya - Lighting and Rendering 2 - AOV's

AOV’s are essentially separate renders using different setting in Arnold Maya, which can be composited together in after effects to create a desired final image. The AOV’s are created in the render settings and saved as an .exr file so that all the layers are saved. In after effects the images are then composted together, in the image below the colour and shading is more effective than the normal render straight from maya.

Final Render 

Maya - Lighting and Rendering 2 - Sub Surface Scattering

 This tutorial goes into depth about texturing the skin on a pre-made model and using sub surface scattering to create the right texture to the skin. There are six maps to replicate the layers and surface textures of real skin and create extra detail that isn't there. When bringing in the final Displacement map, in the render view the character will look like a large blob which can be fixed by turning on auto-bumping and reducing the height in the displacement attributes. The final step is to create an ambient occlusion render as well as a beauty render, and edit them together in photoshop.

Final Render

Week 4 - Rhythm and Hang Time - Moom Poses

During this weeks class we looked at adding in extra poses in the animation to create smoother transitions, as well as the importance of the graph editor. When it comes to using the graph editor to clean up animation, if you use it too mush, the animation no longer has any artistic input. However, if you don't use it at all the animation will inevitably end up looking messy. Essentially in the graph editor the curves need to look smooth and rounded. 

Maya - Lighting and Rendering 2 - Fog (Legacy) and Atmosphere

 In the Arnold render setting there is an option to create aifog. This creates a fog like texture  which can be placed around the scene with settings to create the desired effect as well as changing colour. By adding a temporary background in the render view you can create some interesting effects. 

Arnold also offers aiatmosphere volume. This creates a similar fog like effect to make the atmosphere in your scene more of less dense. Like many other lighting or rendering options as soon as you add these to a scene it slows down render times, however it works effectively to create atmosphere in a scene. 

Maya - Lighting and Rendering - Depth of Field

Depth of Field works in Maya through Arnold to blur out the foreground midground or background to create the desired depth of field, resembling a real world camera. In the Arnold settings of Arnold you are able to change many things like focus distance, aperture size and aperture aspect ratio. 

Through the Arnold tab in the camera you can also add effects like vignette. The depth of field in Arnold works effectively however it has a long render time and you also have to render without the added blur before hand and composite the two together if you want to change between the two. 

Depth of Field Final Render

Week3: Animation - Moom Poses

 During this tutorial we looked at animating Moom with key poses to resemble a piece of reference footage. Setting the scene correctly is important in this process.

Before posing Moom:

-Changing the Graph Editor from Spline to Stepped.

-Changing the animation Tangents to Flat and Stepped in preferences.

-Setting the timeline to 25fps. 

-Making sure the Character Set is uploaded so that everything key frames in one timeline. 

I then key framed three main poses and two extra in between. Below are the results so far as this will be continued next week.

Maya - Lighting and Rendering - Photometric Lights

Photometric Lights in Maya are an effective way to create realistic lighting in a scene with soft shadows, using an IES files to resemble a real world lighting.

The lights are placed around the space to resemble real ceiling lights. 

Final render after added lights.

Maya- Arnold Lighting and Rendering - Mesh Lights

This tutorial explains how to create a mesh light and the pros/ cons of using them. Mesh lights work in Arnold render and can be attached to objects. The process is fairly straight forward and is effective. The only cons are that mesh lights take a long time to render and they interact poorly in close proximity to other objects creating lots of noise which creates a messy render. 

Final Render

Maya- Arnold Lighting and Rendering - Physical Skylight

 This tutorial elaborated on the Physical Skylight lighting option that gives the impression of a realistic sky in the the render view. This is an arnold light. This light works with/ overrides the skydome light which can be seen in the node editor. This pairing creates a heliodome so that the light source (sun) works in a 360 degrees rotation to simulate the different times of day.

Example of light working in render view. 

Example 1- Midday 

Example 2- Sunset

Example 3- Test with different sun/sky tint.

Example 4- Test with different sun tint. 

Week 1: Action Arcs - Moom Poses

 For the first week of Maya tutorials we looked at Moom, a pre rigged character, which we had to place in five different poses based from  five images of our choosing. This is a nice way to start as I still have limited experience with Maya and found human rigs difficult to create. 

Maya Tutorial - Standard Surface Shader

Maya Tutorial - Maya Lights and Light Filters

Gobo 2

Gobo 1

Arnold Area Light 

Maya Area Light 

Spot Light 

Directional Light 

Ambient Light 

Maya Tutorial - Stylistic Internal Lighting

Maya - Arnold Rendering tutorials

Maya - Effects Deformers

Animation 101 Maya Tutorials

Organic Modelling - Final Render

Rigging 101 - Finished Body