Heirarchy ‘Parent & Child’ animation…

Coming closer to my portfolio presentation, I have time to improve on my 3D skills in animation. The lesson today consisted of learning about the hierarchy and its connection with the terms ‘Parent & Child’.

Parent & Child

This is a term where the main object is classified as the parent whereas the connected object is known as its child. Here is a visual representation of what I’m trying to explain;

After engraving this information in our heads, we set out creating a simple character and animating through the hierarchy and practicing the parent and child method.

This was the basic undeveloped animation heirarchy graph for the character I made which shows that each panel is an asset which has been created in maya or already built into the scene during launch of the Maya application.

Each panel is a parent but only if I give something for it to parent with, this is where the term ‘child’ comes into more focus. It’s exactly the same as in real life, for example; A person is not a parent until child is there to be parented.

Recently I have been working on model in my spare time that I can now for practice my animation, hierarchy and parenting skills… not that in real life of course.

As I started this project at home my first thought was what can I create which has a simple skeleton and has a very simple movements such as a walk and idle stance or cycle. Finally I also thought which can be the easiest to make which is not like which is not like me because I like to have a challenge with modelling and animation. And then I clicked, ‘What was the dinosaur called with the long neck which is really slow?’  – Alamosaurus 

Alamosaurus Mesh 

Why not, giving the fact that it’s tool it has a long neck and other distinctive features. It seems easy enough to model, with a good JPEG image plane to work with and the right tools to use. And within a few hours I had a full model of an alamosaurus ready for Rigging and waiting to be brought to life.

Rigging- the method used by animators to set up a simple skeleton frame within a model to animate with.

Afterwards I started setting up the hierarchy for the skeletal structure and it wasn’t easy for the first time trying to get the grasps with what goes where in the hierarchy in terms of ‘what should be the parent and what should be the child?’.

I finally figured it out when I thought about logically what should be connected to what, I started by saying Head, Shoulders, body, hips, legs, feet. Basically working from top down but with the head being the main parent. Just like in the image of this blog you see the shoulder connected to the elbow connected to the wrist connected to the hand. Quite logical when you think about it… here it is laid out more simply for you.

 

 

 

 

Shoulder > elbow > wrists > hands.

 

Up to this point I am currently trying to get my head around ‘painting weights’ for the animation so therefore my model does not bend unnaturally to the key pose I give it. I have inserted a clip showing you what painting weights in Maya is below this paragraph. I hope this teaches you as good as it has taught me.

How to create a hierarchy with Maya.

Autodesk Maya – NEXT GEN IDENT

I have been progressing ever so slightly with my I dent animation developing and refining it with minor changes by using the motion graph editor to help me with ‘block animation’ which also means step-by-step animation to help me get those main poses or key-frames just right…

I’ve also been meaning to redo the lighting to either expose the scene and enhance the aesthetics of the scene. In other words basically bringing out those nice colors and making everything look spectacular. The method I thought which was best using was the three-point lighting method this will contain a main light, filler light and a back light that can bring out much more of the model or the scene.

During the pipeline of development, I was told about a new renderer called TURTLE. Turtle, like mental Ray can enhance and improve lighting by taking characteristics of lightning from real environments and apply them to your own scene which overall can inject realism but on an uncanny level which also introduces the term ‘uncanny valley’.

I DENT scene with motion blur + DoF (Depth of Field)

Uncanny valley – A term used when an event or a scenes characteristic turns out to be not fully realistic.

After all the lighting was complete I then moved on to cameras and the animation of the cameras, for this I did not need to use block animation. Instead, I switched over to the camera view which I wanted to animate and by moving myself to where my assets looked best I could insert a key frame, this would show off my version of what I wanted myself and the audience to see.

The only problem that I faced during this task was trying to get timing right, but I learnt that by going through the timeline I can pick out key points in the scene and position the camera to where I want when I needed. By doing this I found it a lot easier and a lot more successful to improve camera animation within Maya.