Result

This week I set keyframe for all mesh to the final design of each emotion. However I haven’t confirmed with the motion yet. Therefore, it is a result for some screenshot for each emotion first.

Work In Progress

Do you know how much muscles involved in one single smile ?
According to howstuffworks.com :

If we look at a smile that only raises the corners of the lips and the upper lip, it takes only five muscle pairs, or 10 total muscles, to do so. However, if the smile is further reduced to a robotic expression of just raising the corners of the mouth, then it takes only two muscle pairs (four muscles) to smile.

Therefore, I believed the smile facial expression is the most challenging facial expression to animate. The geometry for this model is not quite enough for me to adjust the minor expression.
In human being interaction, insincere smile can quite easy to identify by human being. That is our nature to read others facial expression for us to interact with others in this nowadays society. Therefore, the animation to modify a sincere smile is the most difficult one. I am not satisfied with my result, but I think it is a good start for me to improve my animate skill as character design is not my familiar subjects.

Reflection

For me, controlling the paintweight brush is quite challenging. Sometimes, my brush was not accurate enough for me to paint the skin area I targeted, and in turn it made me spend loads of time to smooth for a blurry area between and black and white area.

Next step, I would like to animate them in one final showreel to show all emotion. In this way, I can demonstrate how the rigging and shape editor helps me to animate the model.

Result

Try to imagine what would you do with a lost item, such as a wallet on street?
In reality, it is expected that pedestrian will pick it up cautiously with head turning to look around for its owner. However, in my character’s design, adding exaggerating body language to present his personalities, tipping toe to look around, and holding his arms on waist while observing the object, communicate to my audience with his personalities,
eg. conscientious and inquisitive, without a word of dialog. Being extreme is a way for me to follow the animation principle (Figure 6b.5) and add excitement in the motion for audience to understand my character.

With adding animation principles as below.

This week, it is the classwork for animating two types of weight, hard ball and soft ball in Maya.

With The Animator’s Survival Kit, every animators know bouncing ball on floor depends on spacing and timing. However, when it apply on stairs, I have to implement the textbook knowledge into practical situation.

Result

Hence, loads of eyeballing adjustments of work in this classwork, which I can hardly descript in written English. I observed my ball in loop play, and somethings were still not right to my eye. After over and over, finally this result is the most acceptable version as the types of weight can be easily identified between hard ball and soft ball.

Result

Maya was the software I had used it around 5 years ago, and I shifted to Cinema4D for a while, as I thought the Maya default render engine didn’t perform well even if I put so much efforts in it. However, after all these years, with Arnold renderer, I am quite surprise with its rapid respond and excellent performance. Despite Maya still crashed for tiny things sometimes, I think I feel more confidence to work with Maya again, as Maya is still the major 3D software in VFX industry. I don’t think there is any reason for me to not work hard to overcome it.

Finally, after weeks, all assets were put into the kitchen scene. What a nice kitchen dinning area for two! I am glad I did it!

Still, for these kitchen scene, I am not satisfied with the texture of cupboard, curtain and fire stove. The wall is too rough as well. Too much exposures around the windows. Loads and loads of things I can keep on complaining. However, within this period of Term 01, I have trained my finger muscle to get use to Maya. Moreover, I’ve kept myself focus in details with aesthetic judgement, which I think it is another endless topics for every artists and designers in this ever-changing industry.

It is a classwork for practising modelling and texture. Also, I learnt how to use maya camera to frame one single frame to output a snapshot.

Result

I think the noise for this scene is way to much, but lighting is quite easy to control. I only used three points lighting for my objects, especially for the glass bottle, the Arnold render is way more qualified than my expectation. Comparing with my experience a few years before, I only used physical render for my output, which is much more time-costuming.

Work In Progress

Then, I would like to add a metal spoon on table.

I would like to add this cupboard to my scene, some details have not decided yet. But I think it is a good practise for me to deal with Maya software, as it is not same as Cinema4D, even some concept may be familiar but I need to train my finger muscles to do all the shortcuts correctly.