Thought I would post up the Maya exercises for the last few weeks... I've been keeping them close mainly because It made sense to collect them till I had the final build of the model. The good news is that I did reach the end (eventually).
Anyway this series of Maya Exercises has been mainly about building a character from the ground up, we were told to watch videos to get a gist of Character building and then take their lesson and rebuild each section of a character. We also hit the Jackpot by getting a bit of Lip Syncing thrown in for good measure but suffice to say over the last six weeks we are meant to have a Character created and have a decent understanding of Lip Sync.
For the Lip Sync we are to understand Visual Phonemes (known in 3D terms as Visimes) so we can sync up sound files with a pre-rigged characters face. Its quite fun until you hear the sound file for the 1 millionth time. Never the less it is a good thing to know!
Figure 1 shows the development of my 3D character. Expanding on the objects built in Weeks 1 & 2 were the shoes (shown in the top right), The Hair, Eyes & Eyebrows (shown in the top left), the arms as an extension on the Shirt (shown in the bottom right) & the head (shown in the bottom left). Its quite cool seeing it now it is all complete but there has been alot of soul searching along the way, I'm much more versed in Character building though which is a good thing to know... Ill need it tomorrow!
Figure 2 is the polished final model altogether. This is the mesh smoothed at level 3 obviously its much lower (I counted it at 5030 polygons). We are going to be taking this character further forward in the next few weeks getting texturing done and some rigging. This will all be beneficial for me as I am the man involved in the rigging of our Narrative Character. I will be beginning development on him tomorrow and very soon he will be complete like this dude :)
The Video above (Generi Lip Sync Week 3) was the developmental stage of our Lip Sync class during week 3. We were basically told to sync up the lips of a pre-rigged character (known as Generi - I'm guessing Generic) with a sound file. This was just expanding the regions of the lips to better reflect accurate oral movement. This was all that was required from this stage as we had already achieved the basic movement of the jaw.
The Video above (Generi Lip Sync Week 5) was the final stage of our Lip Sync classes - the completion of week 5. I smoothed the mesh of Generi just to make everything a little higher poly for the animation to run smoother. Week 5 had us mainly looking at the movement of the tongue and the adaptation of the brow. Basic blinks were also incorporated, basic things really just to make the character feel more alive. To be honest I think it looks quite cool.
Well I think that concludes this little post, I will miss doing the Lip Sync in class but to be honest I'm sure I will have plenty of opportunities on my future characters. There will more then likely be some facial movement on our character for this units Animated short.
More posts will go up about our created character above probably a few weeks down the line, I don't see a point in reporting it every single week... Might as well just let it build up a little before posting about it... Makes for more interesting things going per post.
Talk to ya later!
xXStItChXx
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