Finishing off Biped Model Fixes

Within this lesson we finished off fixing our model joints by tweaking it's envelopes radius.

 (Example of fixing the armpit)

Armpit stretched out big time and looked very weird this involved selecting each point the spiked out of the arm pit. Clicking excluded verts allowed us to remove weights and anything else effecting the point on the models mess, this stops the mess deforming. including selective verts adds allows us to add weight to the selected points. An easy way of fixing deformed or weight problems model parts, is by selecting the points that have the problems and then going into the weight table, there you can turn the weights back to 0 by clicking on the correct points. (Note that you can deform the parts first e.g. the armpit raised up and deformed, then select the points that having problem and reset them in weight table)

 (Example of Weight table)

(Example of weight properties settings, this is where exclude and include verts are located)

 (Example of fixing the head and hair)

Had a problem with the head and hair spiking out of her back and shoulders like crazy. Fixing this involved a lot of time and work to get the hair to move/feel natural and moving her head around and controlling the weight on her shoulders to stop spiking up when movements are made.

 (Example of Scarf fix)

The most common problem was the scarf, whenever moving the legs or arms the scarf moved along with it. So by adding a lot weight to the scarf and attaching it to the model hip the scarf and move about correcting without being effected by it's surroundings.

Outcome: Finding out how to add weights and select individual points to fix them, was a big help in understanding how to fully fix and get a model up and running. Knowing how to fix these problems in more detail can really help me in the future when it comes to rigging and understanding the process in which to take can help me improve my knowledge and skills when it comes to rigging a model in the future.

Applying biped to model

Today we are going to apply our biped to an actual model. Opening a given female model, I open it up within Max to see what the model looked like.


Going into system and adding a biped skeleton ruffly the same height as the female model would allow the following process to be made easier, it's important to get the biped at the right height as I will need to fit the biped into my model. Once they're the same height I then changed my skeleton to a female biped making it a suitable skeleton to work on with the correct gender for the character model.

(Example Of Female model on the left, and female biped on the right)

Going into motion the clicking on figure mode, we can then edit the skeleton structure.
We then edited the toes and turned them into what looks like shoes, then we moved the biped skeleton inside the female model. Making sure the hipes are lined up. We then added in fingers to the biped so that there can be joints for my model fingers later on in the process.

(Example of making toe joints into shoes, and skeleton controls on the right)

We now need make the biped bones match up with the female model, this involves working and resizing parts of the biped bones so they can fit and match up to the models existing arms and legs. Once done we then move onto the hips, hands and feet, the hands were the hardest with it's annoying finger positions.

(Example of Lining up the biped skeleton with the model)

(Example of moving the arms and hands in the correct place)

Selecting an arm and hands that's already done correctly, meant that we didn't have to waste time by going onto the other arm and hands to work on them, I could just copy the completed arm and hands i've just done and paste them onto the other side.
we can do this by going into copy and paste section, and clicking postures, then create collection and the clicking on copy posture, and then followed by paste posture opposite will complete the process. This is a differently a faster way to copy and paste biped bone parts to save time when working with a model joints.

(Example of finished model)

We then made layers once all the positioning on the biped within the model was completed. We created a layer by clicking manage layers on the top bar, then right clicking and clicking create new layer. Now I have two layers, one the model and the other my biped skeleton.

(Example of Layers)

Going into the modifier list and clicking skin we are presented with the option to add bones, which brings up a list of all the bones from the biped, Ctrl A highlights them and allows me to add every bone in my biped.

Now the bones are part of the models, however there are many problems with the bones that are causing deformed parts to her legs and arms etc. So we then go into edit envelopes which is located in the side bar within the modify section.

Clicking on the envelopes we can shrink their raydus to be suitable for animation and movement, as some of the envelopes are over lapping each other and causing the model to deform.

 (Example of all Envelopes)

(Example of control the envelopes radius)

(Example of colours, Red for strong solid, Yellow for medium, and blue for weak)

We will contuiue working on this model and fixing all it's bones and envelopes so that the model can be used fully for any from animation to in game models. 

Outcome: Having always wanted to know how to rig with a model, I found today totaling inspiring and fascinating, I only knew the very basics about rigging but after today lesson, I feel as if I understand it fully. I imagined the task to be easy, adding in bones and then getting the models to move, I didn't know about how the bones would effect parts of the model and cause conflicts with other bone parts. Learning how to deal with these problems, to overcome the task really made me feel more confident about rigging, and I look forward to my next lesson when we can finally sort out the last problems with the model joints.

Biped

Going into systems on the sidebar, we can find biped, from here we can import a Skeleton. Within the biped settings we are able to add tails extra spine parts, arms etc, whatever I liked.

 Example of Skeleton with a tail and extra ribs/spines and leg links

There are four types of biped, skeleton, male, female, and classic.

Resetting the skeleton back to normal so it's ready to be properly animated, we moved onto highlighting a part of a skeleton, we then in the sidebar went into motion settings and then under the biped section, we clicked figure mode allow use to edit parts of the skeleton such as it's toes so they look like shoes.

 Example of toes expanded to make shoes

Turning off figure mode, allows me to now use my skeleton to animate again. We then went into copy and paste in the side bar, and clicked pose, then create a collection, which I named walk cycle.
We then set up our skeleton in a walk pose. Going back to the side menu, we then clicked copy pose just under where the copy collection is. There we can name the copied pose, for this pose where my skeleton is starting his walk with his left leg so I named it L-foot-forward.

Example of pose and setting in sidebar.

Now we needed to make the next part of the walk which is the mid walk, where the knee is bending and getting ready to come up into a walk.

 Example of knee bending

Going back into the side bar and clicking again copy pose, which I then named passing_1, I could now by selecting from the drop list where I save my poses, selected my saved L-foot-forward and then click paste pose opposite. Paste pose opposite allows you get the same pose but reversed, allowing the left leg forward to flip to the right leg forward. I did the same process for my saved mid walk called passing_1, this again like the Left leg mirrored to right leg, allowing me to have a mirrored pose for the mid walk from left to right. I now have four poses made from just two poses, which means I can now create a walk!

 Example of leg reversed and complete timeline of animation.

Rendered out video of my walking animation.

Now knowing the process in which to take, I then decided to make my own animation using biped and poses. My animation would be a Russian dance.

Outcome: From today's lesson I've learned how to import a biped, manipulate the biped skeleton structure to my own usage, move and control my biped, and create a working animation from copying and pasting poses, all of which will prove very useful in time saving and creating my very own animation.

Creating a Storyboard

Today we were asked to draw up our storyboard that we wish to create for our animation. The storyboard I decided to draw up was my Amy Rose adventure story.

As I draw out my storyboard a lot of my story and scenes from my original story structure have been change/improve to suit the time of animation needed as my original idea was only 30 to 40 seconds long. New scenes have been added and the story has taken a different turn. Changes have be made in order to make the story longer, however some of the original idea are still being used.

Here are my storyboard scenes in order.

This is the first part of my storyboard, Amy is walking down the street minding her own business when she sees what she thinks is Sonic The Hedgehog her hero. Amy runs over and gives the stranger a big hug, and then quickly realises that this isn't who she thought it was.

 Amy drops the stranger, while doing this the stranger drops a chaos emerald which he then picks back up. The stranger takes a swipe at Amy, and then receives a call within his ear piece, which reveals to the viewers that he is Metal Sonic and his boss is Eggman. 

Amy now angered gets out her hammer, Eggman calls in reinforcements to deal with her. Three Egg bots drop into the scene, one falling on his head and destroying himself. Out of the blue the robots shut down.

Metal Sonic goes offline, and drops the chaos emerald which bounces over to Amy's boot, she's pretty pleased and happy with herself as she thinks she just beat them somehow. A shot goes to Eggmans base and shows him getting very angry and confused over what just happened. The phone on his work desk rings.

Eggman answers the phone, which turns out to be a fake Technical support call from Sonic the Hedgehog, Tails is in the background laughing over the trick they are playing on Eggman. They trick Eggman into thinking they're going to fix his problem he's having with his machines.

Eggman is put on hold with very relaxing lift music playing, after a while he then clicks onto the fact he's been tricked. Eggman gets very angry and turns all his robots back online himself, once done he then tells Metal Sonic to destroy Amy. This is where the scene ends and then goes into the game of Amy fighting Metal Sonic.

Outcome: I know when it comes to animating my actual story, that there will be again some more changes or improvements, but the storyboard that I've created helps keep me on track in what is happening in what scene and when. Creating this storyboard has allowed me to have a better insight into planning and creating an animation scene/movie. Without taking these steps before animating, the story/scene could completely lose the plot or framework, the storyboard helps to keep you in check.

Creating storylines

Today we were asked to come up 3 to 5 story's of a scene with a start middle and end, that needed to be 5 to 3 minutes long. From knowing from the fact we are allowed to use any models we like and scenes, I came up with a couple of idea's all involving existing game characters. 

Story idea

Idea 1.

Beginning- Amy Rose is walking down a street minding her own business, when she notice what she thinks is her hero sonic, she runs over and hugs what she thinks is sonic, only to turns out to be metal sonic 

Middle - Metal sonic and Amy battle it out

End - Amy ends up smashing metal sonic. 

Idea 2. 

Beginning - Kunimitusu is sneaking around and being secret, she is trying to break in a building to steal a gem. 

Middle- she goes to take the gem but as she does security guards appeal

End- she takes out the guards and escapes with the gem

Idea 3. 

Beginning - Lara croft wakes up tired and weak, looks around trying to find survivors, she thinks she on her own on an island. 

Middle - she tries to keep herself alive and struggles. 

End - when she gets to the point of giving up, she turns around and finds an island of people and hotel. 

Idea 4. 

Beginning - Sonic is dancing on the dance floor trying to impress a girl. But is out danced by knuckles 

Middle - Sonic goes to the bar and gets depressed, sonic remembers he has an emerald and uses it to go super sonic 

End - Super Sonic out dances knuckles, and gets the girl.

Final ideas

After we finished thinking about our story ideas, we then got into groups and shared our story's with the group, from sharing the group voted two of the storys from the list of story idea's we had created.

The two story's that Everyone enjoyed was my Amy rose and metal sonic story (idea 1) and my Lara croft joke story (Idea 3). 

Everyone agreed when it comes to expanding the stories that were voted, it will require a phew changes within the story, this is something I will consider when I expand the two stories. 

Expanded Idea's 

Title: Amy Rose Day Out

Act 1

• Amy is walking down the street minding her own business, she is in a good mood
• As she walks down street she see what she thinks is sonic the hedgehog 
• Excited she runs as fast as she can down the street, ignoring the traffic. 
• She grabs what she thinks is sonic from behind, and lifts him up for a big hug. As this is happening Metal Sonic drops an emerald.
• Amy rose quickly realises her mistake and puts Metal Sonic, as she does Metal Sonic knocks her to the ground.

Act 2

• Metal sonic gets a call on his radio to stop messing around with the girl and get out of there with the emerald.
• Amy Rose gets back on her feet and is now angry. 
• Metal Sonic calls in three egg pawns to deal with Amy as he makes his get away. 
• The egg pawns spawn from no where and charge at Amy. Amy is now really angry, she gets out her hammer and hits the first one to the left, the second to the right. The third one is hit on the end, the kicked up into the air. 

Act 3

• Metal sonic get the order to deal with the Amy himself. He charges at Amy, but Amy jumps over metal sonic, hitting his back with her hammer causing metal sonic to hit the floor. 
• Metal sonic stands up, as he does the egg pawn that Amy hit into the air comes back down and lands on Metal Sonic crushing him.
• Metal sonic hand lets go of the emerald which bounces over to Amy feet. 
• Amy wins the battle and get the emerald as well. 
• End

Title: Lara Crofts Vacation

Act 1

• Lara wakes up face down on a beach
• She looks around, she doesn't know where she is. 
• She tries calling out to see if anyone is about, but no one is around, she is scared. 
• She walks around in circles trying to think about what to do. 

Act 2 

• She tries to survive by first making a fire but failing, but the fire doesn't start. She moves onto  hunting for food but fails to get any, she then tries to make shelter for herself, but the hut she tries to build is blown down. 
• Nothing is going right for Lara, she almost give up hope after trying to keep herself going.
• She lies on the sand and stairs at the sky.
• She tells herself that tomorrow she will do better.
• She performs the same tasks again making fire and hunting for food, and making shelter which all fail again. 

Act 3 

• Lara now gives up, she goes to find a cliff to jump off. 
• As she finds a cliff to jump off she looks over and see a hotel
• She had thought this whole time she was on her own but she was actually near a hotel the whole time. 
• She falls the floor in shame and anger after realising their was a hotel near by. 
• End   

Outcome: Having already had lessons in creating a narrative, I feel the stories that I have created here would all be suitable to be made into an animation, granted some may need more what than other but the structure of the story's can still work in the way I want them to. I'm really looking forward to going onto story boarding one of my stories so that I can truly show how my story plays out.

First Attempt At Walk Cycle

We started the day by opening the simple rig from Moodle. Once opened we then clicked auto key to get the animation time line working, and then set key on frame 0 locking the model in an up right pose.

Going Into motion area on the right side of 3Ds Max, and then by going into parameters, I could then create a position key which I set the value to 20. Then moving onto frame 16, I did the same again but the value at -40, this allowed his right foot to move forward.

(Example of legs in set position by value)

His legs didn't look right, he needed his knees bent, so to do this I moved his body down. Now that his knees look correct, his arms however didn't. I needed to move his arms to the correct position as well, this is because when walking the arms swing, so on frame 16 I moved his arms out, one forward, one behind, so his arms would tween from key frame 0.

(Example of knees bent and arms ready to swing)

The first part of the walk was complete from key frame 0 to 16 his right leg moved forward, but only along the floor. We went to frame 8 and lifted his right leg up to bend the knee more, lifting his foot off the ground. Then by bending the toes on his feet, it shows he getting ready for the impact of the floor on frame 16, this made a realistic walk as it shows his foot/leg moving to show a walk. 


We repeated this pattern for the other leg and arms to get two step/walks out of the model. I worked for a little longer on my walk, as I did have some problems when setting keys. I tried my best to make my model move correctly, so by moving his head to the left when his right leg is forward and swinging his body to the right with his leg moving as well, it helped to create a slightly better and realistic walk animation.

(Example of my walk from the side)

 

(Example of walk from the front)

I played around with some other walks such as a march walk, but 3Ds Max crashed and I lost the work, which is why at the end of my walk within the video he then goes into a march walk, but that animation was lost.

Feeling annoyed at my lost work, I tried another walk with a different model, this model is from my computer, I animated again a walk for the model, with all the moving body motions with it, ears, eye brows, spikes, hands legs and feet. Pretty much everything I could move, but his eyes as they were a texture map.

(Example of Shadow The Hedgehog Rig)

Shadow The Hedgehog walk from side (ignore the eyes I had no control over them)

Shadow The Hedgehog walk from front (Ignore the eyes)

Outcome: The walk animation has really made me question and think about how the human body walks and moves, something as simple as walking has a lot of principles behind the movement, from weight, speed, distance, all of which needs to be taken into account to get that realistic walk. I want to practice more in my own time like I did with Shadow The Hedgehog to perfect my walk, and other types of walks to fully understand the animation tasks needed to perform the task.

Floppy Animation Lesson Five

We were asked to open floppy, a file provided to us on Moodle.

We set our timeline to 40, then we created a key, ticking off the rotation and scale, leaving only position ticked. We only did this on frame 0, 10 and 20 on the timeline.
Going into the curve editor, we selected the first key frame point and then the last key frame point while holding control, and then dragged them up to 40 on the scale within the curve editor. We then set a fast tangent on frame 10 the middle frame, to make the bounce of floppy fast.

(Example of First bounce)

After doing this we selected all the points and then went into the top screen bar (edit), then control and then Parma curve out-of-range types, from there we clicked cycle this repeated the animation over and over making floppy bounce on the spot again and again.

(Bounce on Cycle)

Now we moved on to making floppy squash, working in Z position from the control box which controls the stretch bottom part of floppy, we created a key frame on frame 10 and the same for frame 9. Turning auto key on, and squashing floppy with the control box on key frame 10, resulted in making floppy look like he's getting ready for the bounce up plus the force of impact from jumping into the bounce, we left frame 9 normal for now.

(Example of what Floppy looks like squashed)

Having problems with frame 9, I managed to work my way around the problem by going into the curve editor on the bottom control box (Red box within picture) on key frame 10, and dropping that frame lower than 0 on the curve editors scale, making the bounce on the floor correct, instead of going into frame 9 and moving floppy back into place with the floor before the bounce happened on frame 10.

(Example of bounce with no frame 9, and bounce animation past 0 on scale)

I creating a key frame for 0 and 20 for a stretch for floppy when he's in air for the next step. Highlighting frame 0 and 20 for the stretch top control box within the curve editor, I then moved them up the scale so floppy would scratch out at the start and end of animation as frame 0 and 20 are at the same scale start to finish, resulting in a perfect loop. I did the same on the stretch bottom control box as well which controls floppy lower half of his body.

(Example of stretch bottom control box for floppy)

(Example of stretch top control box)

We now moved onto making floppy more life like by making him look at where he's jumping, for this we went to the twist control box and made frame 0 a rotation key instead of a position key working in X rotation only.
The first frame we moved floppy's head back to make it look like he looking up as he jumps, then we went to frame 4, by this frame floppy is getting ready to look at the floor as he is about to hit it. By frame 8 he's looking right down at the floor. Frame 13 bending his head back again but dramatically to show the force behind bounce, by frame 20 we set our (create key) source time to 0 so it at the same scale as frame 0 helping make a perfect loop.

(Example of Twist control box of floppy's head movement on curve editor)

After completing his head or upper part to his body, we then moved onto his foot rotation control box. Inserting a (create key) on rotation on 0, 10, and 20, we then went to frame 5, this is where his feet is out ready to embrace the floor, and frame 13 for his feet behind him as he pushes back for the jump, all of which created a comical and life like animation for floppy.

(Example of Foot Control box on curve editor)

We then moved onto his ears, we did this by selecting and working on the ears controls box individually to get a natural looking effect for flopping we used the animation technique over lapping with the ears to help create the force and friction on his ears.

(Example of all rotations in floppy's ears)

Now that everything is done to make floppy look like he bouncing, we needed to make him move, we did this by selecting the compass looking arrows which controls the location on floppy, by clicking that we then created keys in which positions we wanted. Working in Y, I made floppy move across the screen on key frames 0, 10 and 20. Once I was happy I then went into edit, controller, then put of range types and set it on relative repeat making flopping bounce on for ever!

(Example of Y axis movement of Floppy control box to make floppy bounce forever)

Going into modify, then into cameras, we could chose two type of camera for now we selected target camera. Using the target camera we placed it in the working environment and positioned it where I liked, until I was happy. I also linked our camera to floppy, so where ever floppy goes, my camera follows, allowing some great video shots.

(Example of camera)

Here is the render result of my animation that I made from today's work.

 

The animation of floppy does appear to be slightly harsh in his movements and animation but still shows a wide range of movements and emotions within floppy. 

Outcome: Understanding how control boxes work, along side the tweaks and loops used within the curve editor to achieve such great animations really helped me to gain a good understanding of how to perform animations to a good level of standard within 3ds Max. Today lessons was very busy, but worth it as I learned a great deal, from the usage of body language, (Helped by the 12 rules of animation, Anticipation, Squash and stretch, and over lapping) even how to use a camera within an animation, something of which has never crossed my mind within animation. Being able to see my animation working and performing the way I wanted it to brings me great satisfaction.