Week 04 Use the EP curve tool to create a hair

I find the tutorial in The modeling & animation handbook about how to create hair and do some exercise.

First: Select create EP curve tool and do all my work in front view.

Second: Select create nurbs primitives —--circle, and then select both curve and circle by shift and create the hair curve.

Third: Under the surface menu Extrude and □, and do the options like following:

style→tube

Result position → at path

Pivot →component

Orientation → Profile normal

Output geometry → polygon

Type →Quads

Tessellation methods to count

Count to 40

Forth: Edit Mesh → Merge to center

Finally, I create a new lambert in hypershade and texture my character’s hair as yellow as the picture.  

 

week03 Head modeling

This week I focus on head molding, and I did the research on “The Modeling & Animation Handbook” which is a handbook of Autodesk Maya 2009.

My modeling is from a cube as following: Width divisions to 6, Height division to 6, and depth division to 3.During the molding, I found that Insert edge loop tool; Split edges are the very important tool. When extrude the eyes, brows, nose and mouth we need those tool to insert new edges.   

But I got a problem about Mirror instance in Edit—Duplicate special. When I delete half head and duplicate is ok. But when I extrude the nose and mouth, there is still have a surface in the middle part, and after press “3”, the head is looks so strange.

I also got the online tutorial, the address is that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d0viMxjD_E.

week 02 Insert a reference layer into my maya

Edit my drawing as side and front view in PS, press ctrl+ r using the ruler tool during this step. And then save them as TIFF format. The next step is inserting my drawing in Maya.

I got two different ways to do this step.

First way is that using NURBS plane and a file texture that is mapped onto that plane. For this step, I must make sure about I already created a project folder. The steps are as fowling:

A: create—NURBS Primitives—Plane-option box and rename as front reference plane.

B: In channel box rescale the plane according the image.

C: Window—Rendering Editors—Hypershade.

D: Create—Materials—Lambert.

E: MMB click and drag the newly created Lambert material onto your NURBS plane and double click the Lambert and click the option button behind color. Chose File and open the front image.

F: When move cursor over a view panel and press 6 ,the image appear in my Maya view panel.

G: Also in the same way to input side view into Maya.

Finally, in the layer Editor of the channel Box, and create a new layer and rename it as reference layer.

The second is Image Planes. This is still work in window Hypershade and the steps are similar, for the following two steps are different.

A: Tabs—show Top and Bottom tabs.

B: Click on cameras tab to display all the cameras in the scene in the top panel, and MMB+ drag an imageplane onto the camera frontshape in the work area.

For me, I do not like Image plane, because I think it is difficult to reposition camera image plane.

Nancy's work for week 01

For this week, I just wondering how to design a character by myself and consider something about what kind of character I prefer.

I found a very helpful book called “An Essential Introduction to Maya Character Rigging” in library. This book contains eight parts which are from very beginning introduction. First thing I learn from this book is some common Hotkeys used in Maya. Such as press F1 I could go to Maya help directly. F2 link with Animation Menu, F3 connect with Modeling Menu, F4 means surfaces Menu, also 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8.9 have their special meaning and so on. Also I try them under my working surface. I considered if I want to familiar with those complete codes it will cost a really hard time to do more practice, however I still think those code must be very helpful during create my characters and save such time.

The most cool thing in this book is that the owner designed workflow for each step of designing. Now I will share one of the workflow:

Also this book recommends a boy’s work on http://www.zapmyshorts.com/site/zap/1/ . I love the banana one, it’s really funny.

And I just consider about my first character, and just do some sketches. I will use one of them as my first toy idea. Next week I will do more work on modeling. Now I will show my pictures here,Those pictures I do it on PS and Hand-painted plate to create. 

 

And those pictures just paint them on pieces of paper.