This week, as i mentioned in the presentation i gave last week, i felt confident enough to move onto creating the model and rig for the Small, Speedy, Straitjacketed game character.
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| Concept art created by our Artist Lewis Coleman |
I was given the Photoshop document you see below, it contains an arrangement of all the body parts in separate layers as well as different facial expressions and alternate hands holding either food or drink items.
I took each of these layers and saved them as separate images, then booted up Maya. I set about creating the planes that i would be using for each of the body parts first, but before doing anything else i created one plane and imported its texture as this was something i hadn't practiced, though it was something we had done in our first year Maya sessions. Whilst my technique was fine, i immediately i ran into a problem: Image stretching.
My hope was that the images would simply appear on the plane scaled normally but cropped by the edges if the plane wasnt big enough to fit it, and that it would simply be a case of making each plane fit the image it was displaying. Sadly i instead found that Maya would stretch or squash the image to fit in the plane on to which it was being applied, and there was no way (as far as i found) to change this. Luckily it didn't take me long to invent a solution to this problem.
This solution was to take each of the body-part images and save them in a square resolution so that i could then create a plane that had a matching size (e.g. image with 450x450 pixel resolution would be applied to a 4.5x4.5 default Maya unit plane) allowing for a consistent scale to the model, hopefully giving a result that looked imperceptible from the Photoshop image i had been given. The results were exactly that, i used a template image to make sure the scale was correct and to match the pose, giving the result shown below.
The template image (left) looks a little strange and that's because i had to go back to the Photoshop document and make the hidden body parts visible so i could pose them properly.
Skinning the model was a simple enough process, i used the same technique as i used with my Test Rig, though i had to use the Outliner to make some selections as the overlapping planes made it difficult or impossible to select the body parts i was trying to bind the model to.
When creating the IK handles for the rig i encountered a problem i hadn't faced with my test rig. I found that both of the arms on my model would only bend in the wrong direction. To solve this i basically had to unbind the bones from the rig entirely, after which i arranged the arm parts in a concave shape before binding them to the bones again. Due to the way IK handles are created, they must have some indication of the direction in which they are supposed to bend before being created, hence bending the limbs slightly before creating them.
After this my rig was finished and ready to be animated!
So in celebration i whipped something up to test it out (apologies for the horrific video quality but you get the idea):
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