Category: Maya

Reference links :[Referenceimagedesign] and [Referenceimagecolor]

We are starting a new 4 week project for our Maya classes. This project is going to be about we make an oddly satisfying animated video. You can find all these kind of videos online on youtube for example. These videos that are very pleasing to the eye show an animation loop that will have a perfect fit through different objects. In the video just below there are many examples of these oddly satisfying videos.

Nick showed us an example he created himself, this draft was made with the effect of MASH. MASH Utilities are a set of helpful tools that either function on or are aided by MASH networks. don in this utility space you have many different effects you can use on a simple object. Nick gave us the example by using the replicator and the curve. You first start by changing the distribute in a way you like (by making a grid or a radial, kind of like the duplicate special). When you get something you like you can give it different types of effects.

Using the replicator it will [as it says] replicate the MASH that you created using the distribute editor. this will create more versions of your created MASH. Look at the ‘replicator and distribute’ image to get an understanding of what this looks like.

The other example Nick gave us was with the MASH curve where you can also use a simple 3D object and make the MASH follow a spline, this could be random or linear. look at the image below ‘Follow the spline’.

So these two images below are my try of using the MASH tool to see if I want to include this in my satisfying machine. I created the 2 types of MASH with a simple cube to start with and see what I could come up with. Using this tool was quite easy to understand, you get a nice menu where you can choose different effects to apply on your MASH. The fun thing about the MASH is that you are able to animate every little part in your MASH. For the circle I tried to randomize the rotation of the cubes and give them a trail. I am still a bit uncertain on how to use the trail in the MASH but I think it adds a nice bit of flow in the animation. I also made some swirly ‘tornado’ using the distribute and the replicator to replicate my first MASH. This was a good class to get to know the tool and play around with it so for testing out the effect I quite understood what a few of the different assets did.

Thinking about the oddly satisfying project I tried to figure out what I wanted to do for my satisfying animation. I searched around on Youtube / Pinterest to get different inspirations on what people had done for their own satisfying animation. one of the inspirations being the video that is at the top of this block. I had a bit of a difficult start to finding something that I wanted to create, there are many different ways on how to create a satisfying machine which was a little bit overwhelming for me. In the end I came up with the idea to create a wave loop animation in where there is a small boat that will stay still in the center of the wave simulation and will goo up and down according to when the waves will appear. The two images below give a reference of what I am trying to create, click on the pinterest links on the images to go to the animation/video.

Starting off with my idea I tried to recreate the wave animation shown in the left inspiration image. This wave is also created with what Nick learned us in class, MASH. The first test I did was with a cube and added a MASH to this, from here I assigned the MASH to show as a grid and made it were it is x 24 by z 24. Then I started to follow a tutorial on how to create a wave motion. It is the tutorial shown above this text. To create this wave the tutorial shows that you need to use the OFFSET, in the MASH menu this creates a controllable tool that you can modify and move to create the waves I want for my scene.

I also recreated the wave I made and adjusted the grid size and the shape, the shape in this version is formed as a cylinder with a low polygon count, you can see this version in the video above. For the results of the shape I prefer the cylinder shape since in my eyes this looks a little bit more organic and a wave is a very flow motion ‘shape’. As for the gird I think there are too many and it is a little bit too long, this makes for a few problems where I am having trouble to get a correct loop going. So I decided to make a new version with the cylinder shapes but a smaller grid size, This version is shown below. I still have to change a lot of things in the wave motion since the shape of how the wave goes is not entirely correct/ how I would like it to be, It has to broad of a flat surface and the wave is too cylinder. The tutorial shows that you also can create your own shape. This will be my next step for this satisfying video.

This is the final product on the Rude Goldberg Machine made during our Maya classes. Reflecting back on this project I had Quite a few struggles during this whole process. Bullet is a dynamic system that I found not always easy to use. I have a feeling that it has a few bugs in it since sometimes it would shift through the object even though I made it an passive object and the other an active one. I also used the shatter mechanic on some part which did not really combine that well with the bullet dynamics. In the end I created something I really like but it still feels like some things are not really working how they suppose to work. To give it my own style I created a Background with a lot of gears and a clock. This clock is activated at the end of the video and will speed up the time.

We have to make a Rude Goldberg Machine by week 4, This is a machine with our own design that portrays a reaction of events that collide with each other. In this class we had to work on our own Rude Goldberg machine and Nick was there to help us with any questions we had.

One of the ideas I got for this Rude Goldberg Machine is to use the Newtons cradle in my machine. So I searched for a reference images and started to model my own version of this (shown in the 2 images below). For it to work I searched on Youtube to get a basic guideline. I used the tutorial video you see above this text and started to connect this to my work. There is one problem with this: the video was an older version of Maya (2015) which did not include the bullet effect we were working with. The nail in this video is still in the new Maya software but it is not connected to the bullet effect. So I had to ask nick how to do it differently. He showed me a way in the new software which was basically the same as the video shown above but then in the Bullet drop down menu.

For the Rude Goldberg Machine I did not really know where I was going through my process yet. So I started off with just making a begin to my project of parts I already would be able to do. These are the things we learned during the last class, as shown in the images above I made a slide using the spline tool and made a ball bullet over this slide. It then hits these domino cards that go smaller into a smaller ball. This ball rolls to another slide part and ends in the ramp. This is till how far I designed my Rude Goldberg Machine, I still have to connect the end of this scene to my Newtons Cradle.

This week we had a fresh start on the new term starting with our first class being Maya’s class on a Monday. We got explained what we would be doing over the next few weeks. he gave us examples of 2 different things, one being different views on oddly satisfying 3D animated videos. The other and most important one is the Rube Goldberg machines that he showed also different examples of.

We started the class by looking into dynamic animations, so we started by making a simple animation of a ball bouncing and falling down stairs. so we first started animating the bouncing ball after that we also made a ball that in real life has a bit more mass to it, it falls off the stairs instead of bouncing. (scroll down to see a video example)

As I said before we got introduced to the Goldberg machine which is a machine of cause and effect, where if the machine gets activated there is a chain reaction. In Maya, we got introduced to the bullet effect, which is something to use to define for example gravity of a certain object. We started by creating a simple domino effect as shown in the video below.

This is the last week of this term. This week we finished the 3D lip-syncing face model we worked on over the last few weeks. Over these weeks we modeled, textured, rigged, and shape-blended this model to get a lip-sync to a video that we were allowed to choose ourselves. I choose this video of this actor saying: ‘THE BIGGER THEY ARE…. THE BIGGER… THEY… ARE…’ This was the first ‘quote’ I could think of and thought it would be fun.

I realized while creating the rig for the lip-syncing animation that I choose a rather difficult thing to create a lip-sync over. In the video, the man is screaming a lot because of this a lot of the frames are blurry. Also, a screaming face makes a lot of the skin stretched which makes me use a lot of blend shapes to get the right facial expressions.

Looking back on this I think I could have done a little bit better. The render of the face is a little bit too matted for my taste and not really like good skin and the facial expressions are not expressed enough, I am missing a few wrinkles at some parts and some more eye movement. For the movement of the face I think it lines up quite well with the yelling that is going on and all around it is a good try for my first try but it still needs a lot of improvement.

At the beginning of this term, we made a hot air balloon for the hot air balloon festival. Since it was very rushed the classes I was not very content with my design. I felt it was lacking a lot and not really mine but one that everybody made. so I went online to get some references and redid the whole balloon. I added some extra things and paid more attention to make it have no wrong edges. I also made a sketch of how I wanted the balloon to really look then I jumped into Maya and created this better version of my hot air balloon.

For the ropes, I did the same as I learned in class and duplicated it a few times to create the roped X pattern along the balloon. behind that, I did some ‘platforms’ to give the balloon a bit more depth. Instead of immediately tying the ropes from the balloon to the basket I decided to use hanging ropes and connect the basket to the balloon through iron bars. The only things I used from the old hot air balloon were the coil and the gas tank, I feel that these 2 things were already quite good in my first draft. Lastly, I added a few more details to the basket to make it a little bit more its own thing, with more ropes, and hanging sacks. For the texture, I used mostly basic textures that are already presented to me through the Maya software.

During these two weeks, we have been busy with lip-syncing the head to an audio file. We made shape blends a few times during this term but also deleted them a lot to start over. I now have a small example of the start of my lip-syncing which I still have to change a lot. but here is a sneak peek of the model:

It is still missing a lot of movement, at the moment it is only a part of the mouth that is moving up and down and changes a bit. but as you see in the video there are a lot more things that are moving than only the mouth. this is where we need to use the blend shapes that we got introduced to. These blend shapes give us the ability to give our modeled faces a bit more expression. You have to open the rigg first as far as it goes at that part and then add blend shapes to animate it, these blend shapes are used for a more natural look.

for this week we did a rigg on the face model so that the mouth can open and close. We worked with the weight tool to make sure all the correct “muscles” are on the correct rigging point. we did this to open the mouth to add the teeth. We worked on this for most of the class so we get the mouth open in the right way. we used the rigg to slightly tilt up the head so we could open the chin to really spread out the weight.