Character Animation
For my Character, I decided it would be a good idea to recreate a character, Which I designed during my year in Level 2 Games (4 years ago).
I’m glad I decided to do this because this would allow me to look back on my past work and improve on it, as well as seeing how much I’ve improved over the years since the original drawing.
With this being the first attempt on this character in the 4 years I first designed her. When I first created the character 4 years ago I wanted to give her a lab coat. However, I wasn’t sure how to do that properly so I didn’t give her the coat. But now I was able to do so in the ‘redesign’, but for the most part the main concept hadn’t changed.
When it Came to modeling my character I realized I didn’t know where the soften edge and set flow tools were in maya, since I had used them a lot in 3ds max I knew I’d need them in maya, thankful it was a quick search away.
This GIF shows the full process of this model for this project. It show the all my iterations of my progress in this project.
This is my texture maps, base colour and transparency, I would of liked to have had more time to work of these and add more depth to the textures, even add a normal map.
This is the final result of my work, I am relativity happy with how its turned out, however I’m not 100% satisfied with this.
There is defiantly room for improvement, from topology to rig, skin and controls.
Firstly, after starting to animate my character I realized that things were wrong in the shoulders and legs, however I could not fix this, as much as I tried, I would unbind the skin and try to fix the problem, but after binding it again errors popped up every time.
The skinning process wasn’t to bad, in fact I kind of enjoyed it. This was mainly because I was using the component editor more the painting the weight on.
The Rigging was also simple for me to follow, but sadly we didn’t have time to implement controls to our models, however I did try to, but that didn’t work out since we were short on time.
Finally the animation was rushed, I had tried to make it work without controls but in the end I think that was the biggest fault to my animation, aside from being short on time. I knew I didn’t want to move the joints, just rotate them, which is what I did. I wanted to add a up and down moment to the character but I couldn’t get it to work properly. The resulting being a characters whose “feet are just skidding on the ground” as someone who gave me feedback said.
All in all, I think this is a good start to character modeling in Maya. plus for a second attempt at character modeling, I think its not the worst out there.
DeathRoe Games 