Month: May 2022

Because my research focuses on animal behavior, I don’t want to spend too much time rigging, especially quadrupeds. Very fortunately I found a very useful model of a rigged hairless cat online. After that is the link to the model.

by Truong CG Artist：

https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/DV51/sphynx-cat-maya-rig

The model is bound very well, and there are a lot of controllers. Before using this model to animate, I need to group its different controllers and get familiar with what each controller controls.

This group is the body part, and I used this group first to animate.

The entire interface looks much clearer, and no extra controls are accidentally touched during the animation process.

This group is the ears and tail. Once I’ve animate the body, I’ll animate the ears and tail.

This group is an expression.

This last group is a few small controllers, some I’m not sure what it does, and some I might not use in my animations. These are all temporarily grouped into this group and don’t turn it on during the animation.

Because my research is mainly in animation, the scene I build is very simple.

First, you need to import the reference sequence frame and the model to be used, and the scene size needs to conform to the model size.

The requirements for this scene are not high, as long as the platform for the bird to walk is built.

In order to facilitate the production of animation later, I kept the ground seam on the table. It allows me to clearly locate the position at different times.

This is very important in the process of making animations later on.

In my project, the bird basically walks with its wings folded, so I need to understand how the bird folds its wings.

So I first went to the supermarket to buy a chicken in the easiest way, so that I could clearly see how the bird’s wings folded. And because the chickens in the supermarket are all hairless, they look very clear.

Next I went to the Natural History Museum again. There is an exhibition hall about birds, which has very detailed examples with examples, detailed information on bird wings, claws, tails, hair, etc., and even anatomical diagrams. These are very useful to me. I’m very interested in how the bird’s hair grows on the wings, even though the model I used in this project is already hair-ready. But I still learned about the growth of a bird’s hair in detail through the materials in the museum and anatomical maps.Next I went to the Natural History Museum again.

There is an exhibition hall about birds, which has very detailed examples with examples, detailed information on bird wings, claws, tails, hair, etc., and even anatomical diagrams. These are very useful to me. I’m very interested in how the bird’s hair grows on the wings, even though the model I used in this project is already hair-ready. But I still learned about the growth of a bird’s hair in detail through the materials in the museum and anatomical maps.

In the end, the chicken was very tasty.

The main work of this week is to build the scene. Because my project mainly focuses on animation, the scene construction is relatively simple. The marble material is the marble material that comes with MAYA.

Importing reference sequence frames and models into the scene makes it very clear how big the scene should be built and where the various parts are best positioned. This is very useful.

I replaced the glass part of the scene with sequence frames. I’m not going to make glass because it’s going to be cumbersome to render and texture, but I need a face to replace the glass so I know where the cat’s claws should stop when the cat flies at the fly. So I replaced the glass in the scene with the face of the imported sequence frame. This not only solves the problem of no glass, but I can see the movements of the cat in the reference very clearly for animation.

This image is a simple rendering, I need to see what the scene looks like. I’m not going to put a lot of effort into the scene. So for me it’s fine as long as the scene looks good.

Story Board

In this project, I want to show more bird animation principles and my ability to do 3D animation, so I want to show more bird animation principles in this project for my model, as well as my 3D animation. capacity, so my model chooses to download from the web.

ModeRed Whisker Bird Maya Rig by  Truong CG Artist：

Download Link：

https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/zd62/red-whisker-bird-maya-rig?utm_source=artstation&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=homepage&utm_term=marketplace

Very thanks to Truong CG for the model here, allowing me to get a very nice rig model for my homework at a very friendly price.

This image shows all the controllers on the model. In order to reduce the load on the computer, I did not put the texture in.

Because there are so many controllers for this model, I divided the required controllers into many layers. The body, wings, claws and other parts are layered. When I animate later, I will do the body animation first, then the wings animation, and finally some details.When doing animations, only open the devices you need.

After layering adjustments, the entire model looks clean and fresh, and there are no unnecessary controls. It laid a very good foundation for later animation.