3DModeling

Coming soon an animated movie about a Walt Dinosaur Princess dancing through the forest.

Okay, this tutorial's exercise files have mental ray which were discontinued by their manufacturer a year ago. The computers at school keep wigging out and crashing so I had to revert to doing this at home on my student version of Maya.  Went over rigging lower jaw, mouth bones eye bones then setting up a deform lattice for the eyebrows based on selected mesh faces. And then tied that massive cluster f...ormation of clusters to the upper jaw of body less singer head. "I's am thaaah zombie!" And then made some more channels and weird wordy stuff giving him some new 1950's 3D glasses: (I REALLY do NOT like curves for controllers.) Anyway at this point my computer decided to join the school computer and started boycotting Mental Nodes and I could no longer edit or see the channels. Okay, so I appear to have found a work around, Mental Ray, was able to get the exercise files (not the one I had worked on) to open up sort of in Maya 2017 and older ve...

Started with a cool looking toon T Rex and some slanted legs. Continued with the neck which is using a slightly different set up which I believe is going to allow for a more snake like neck movement, did the hands and talons.: Then set up a controller on top of the head and using the connection editor to point the curve in the neck and then making the controllers in the neck no longer necessary. Made Locators to keep the controller in place (although my pyramid controllers are harder to select than his boxes) and Volume 3 Tutuorial is done. And here's a shot of the IK controls (since we rigged them to show up based on if you selected IK or FK for the neck).

In part two we created foot bank which DOES NOT have any money in it, we then created a channel to control the foot bank and then built a expression which seemed far too close to math for my tastes. We then went over setting the proper rotate order which if not done correctly could summon a demon called Gribbol Loch (no idea how the demon got involved) apparently this demon has lots of "issues." Refined the controls for the fingers an cleaned up a lot of parameters that wouldn't be used (now fingers can be moved individually, kind of like Twix). I gotta give it to this guy, he's all about giving animators the fingers including using curves as controllers which are almost impossible to select. Then duplicated the mesh and created a blend shape to make a grin, took AWHILE to find the paint blend shape weights tool due to the video being outdated but eventually found it. Finished by adding a control channel for the blendshap in the head anim group and hidi...

We somewhat rigged the torso in a painful doesn't seem efficient or useful sort of way using curves which are EXTREMELY difficult to select. So this guy is one of people responsible for making Maya figures SO DIFFICULT to animate.  Made neck and head controls. Added eyes which didn't work exactly right. Then did IK controls on wrists, ankles and pole constraints on elbows and knees. Then went into making a foot roll. Then how to add attribute and modify them to control other joints to make a hand control: And then cleaned up by turning the visibility of the IK and skeleton groups to zero, but they can be made visible by reading from the Necronomicon.

Rigged the first arm using and auto centering function in Maya. Which worked sorta... okay it sorta didn't work, but was fixable. The he showed how to rig the finger so he can give it to someone. Bound the skin to the bones then used the "Weight Hammer" which is not called that as it has apparently been called Hammer Skin Weights for YEARS and PluralSight hasn't caught up. And made him a global control shape that COULD NOT be the same shape as the one in the video.

Gave him a a spinal column so now someone can FINISH HIM! And rigged out to his eyballs, even though I can't see the eyeball, but in wire mesh mode you can tell that they're rotating along with he two toothes.

Note started with the exercise file due to losing access to the school computer with my previous work (only had one leg rigged so not a big loss). Completing the leg joint and giving them names.

Screenshot of beginning to model the Imp's legs.