Final- Demonic Bunny Model

I basically modeled a sketch of a demonic bunny that was inspiration for a game my friend is producing on his spare time. I wanted to try to rig a part of the character and have a small animation but I didn't have enough time to wrap my head around the concept. I spent a great deal of time manipulating the polygons after being converted from Nurbs. I had a design sketch to follow in my backdrop, but my friend wanted me to change it up a little bit so I added a top hat to the devious creature. I decided to just add a turntable to preview my model for the rendered version. The hardest part in general had to of been the construction of the hands. I had to extrude a lot of faces off of a polygon square and size them accordingly to acquire the designated look and feel of the overly sized hands. The demonic bunny idea stemmed from previous work my friend had seen, and he altered it up a little bit. He then asked me if I could change up some of the intricate details. So I added a bit of a humorous effect by creating the top hat out of polygons. The spikes were created by extruding faces off of the back and arms. Every objects was created seperatly. Each hand, each leg, each arm, head, and torso was created as a Nurb and then converted to a polygon after I had the desired shape. Many isoparms were added to acquire the intricate detail in the previous stages of working with the Nurb primitives. I came across the interactive split tool when working in the polygon construction stage. This gave me a advantage in creating a abstract shape which added vertex's where I pleased. I will be learning how to rig this bad boy within the next few weeks!

Lowman "Tipsy turney"

Within this lowman activity, I decided to make lowman very wobbley and somewhat tipsy, as if he had one to many drinks! I didn't quite get the grasp of working with the the walking cycle, so I decided to have him stationary. I have been so caught up with model figuring that this exercise came with some difficulty.

Mid-Term Proposal- "Ice Cream Boy Cartoon"

Proposal:  To construct a model of a cartoon figure eating a ice-cream cone, using polygon primitives. The goal was to have the ice-cream melt from the cone and hit the ground while the modeled character put his tongue out because of the horrifying sight of ice-cream melting..

A majority of this project was the manipulation of the body and head, to get my desired results. I used cylinders for the creation of the head and torso. The arms were very basic and the hands were cubes. I wanted to go with a cartoon like feel, somewhat of a lego character implementation. I was not interested in making him look surreal. A lot of finagling with the hyper shader gave me the desired color/texture pallet. A flannel image was taking from the internet for the hat and shirt. The most complicated part of the project was probably the development of the eye socket, retina, and pupil. I thought the eye's would bring out the most of the cartoon appearance, being that eye's range bring out the most in people. I created two polygon primitive spheres overlapping. I set the transparency of the outer to clear, and the inner to a light blue. A concave was applied to the eye, and then a pupil was inserted by detaching the circular face and moving it back from the inner eye. As for the hat, I cut a polygon sphere in half and attached a plane to it for the brim. I then detached some points on the plane to get the desired shape. The mouth was also created by cutting a drawn face out of the head.


Self Evaluation:

In all, I feel like I accomplished a lot, and learned a vast amount of tips about character creation through many tutorials online. This project  has fueled me to put aside some time in the future to understand the basics in creating cartoon characters in maya and animating them for television shows/games. In the future I would love to be able to have a fully mobile character, and be able to perfect the animation aspect of maya.



Video:

Cartoon character "Pre-midterm"

I used polygon primitives to create a sketch up of my animated cartoon character. I decided after creating this very basic figure that I would take my midterm project in this direction. From here I will manipulate the polygons and give him a more life like shape. I will add more textures to create a face. I will also try to develop a small animation for him, maybe a blink of an eye, or an opening of the mouth.

CV Butterfly

I was unsure of what to exactly make for my midterm project, I was caught between a butterfly flying through a wooded landscape, or a model of a third dimensional cartoon character. I decided to give both a try to see what direction I wanted to head in. I used the CV curve tool to create the wings,antennas, and body. I used the revolve function to create the butterfly's full body. I put the butterfly in a motion path and animated it's wing to give it a lively effect. I reversed the axis of the wings throughout the animation timeline. After producing this I went on to create a sample for my cartoon character.

Model of Coffee Mug

The model I chose to design was a coffee mug. I worked with cv primitives to create the foundation of the mug. Then I used the "revolve" function to finalize my design. The handle was created with a half sweep torso.

I continued with the tutorial and got everything down perfect! The flame effect came together nicely and the particle emitter was really fun to work with. Im starting to get the hang of working with the Maya interface. Im excited to start using these skills to make my own project.