Week 4 // June 23 - June 29
On Monday (June 23), I was working on designing this website and putting up some of the content. I tried several different layouts and color combinations, and finally settled on the design that looked complete yet was flexible enough to allow me to gradually modify it as I get more ideas. I spent Monday and Tuesday searching the web for Maya tutorials and the information on lattice-assisted animation. My PC station crashed at the end of the day on Monday, showing its blue screen of death as a sign of protest against my assiduous efforts to tap into the secrets of Maya.
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| A bowing flower surrounded by lattices |
On Wednesday (June 25), we had a meeting with Jessica at 1 p.m. I was at work at 9 a.m. animating a flower bow. It proved to be quite a challenging task. In order to animate it with lattices, I had to keyframe each change: position the flower the way I want it to be, set a key, make the next change, set a key and so on. Sort of like a hand-drawn animation only in 3D. A lattice puts a bounding box around the model that one is trying to animate, and by pulling on different points on a lattice or by rotating them, it's possible to deform an object. However, due to too many control point on a lattice, sometimes, when you are trying to modify one thing, something else suddenly changes. I was experimenting with a number of subdivisions on the lattice, with less of them giving poorer control over the object. Yet, by increasing the number of subdivisions it became harder to select the necessary vertices.
During the meeting Jessica pointed out how the lattice deformation affects the proportions of an object (e.g. the stem becoming thicker or thinner). We would want to have this option on some characters but not on a flower... then again, as Mo said, you wouldn't animate a flower using a lattice, since it's more natural to use splines. Jessica left us discussing ways of binding lattices to the character and making them fit the geometry of an object.
I got my PC station back on Thursday (June 26). I was chuckling at how even after being fixed, it was very moody: it didn't want to recognize the mouse until the maintenance guy logged in as an administrator (but even then it gave us trouble by running 'install new hardware' windows several times). Afterwards, it wouldn't let us log in, complaining that it couldn't find the domain (even though it could be seen & pinged through the network). But, eventually, it surrendered and started working :-)
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| An excerpt from a LaTeX document I was working on |
I decided to install LaTeX today. LaTeX is a type-setting editor (like Word), which allows you to program (yeah!) the way your document will appear. I also heard that it makes it easier to cite other sources, which is very handy considering that this part gave me a bit of grief the last time I had to write my final report. I am planning on taking some time to get used to this editor, so that soon I can start compiling my final report. Although, we are still working on narrowing down the problem for the project, I feel like I can start drafting the 'Related Work' section, since I am reading a lot of papers.
Laurel asked me if I could help her compile a plug-in for Maya. Most all of the workstations have Maya 8.5 installed. The plug-ins work fine for them. However, trying to get the plug-ins to work for Maya 2008 is trickier, since each Maya version requires a very specific version of Visual Studio (the compiler). Since I am familiar with Visual Studio, I think solving this problem will be pretty easy.
I continued my research on lattices on Friday (June 27). Shira and I had to play a bit of musical chairs with our computers, because of the scarcity of machines that have Maya 2008 installed on them. Finally, I decided to work with Maya 8.5 (a version preceding Maya 2008). It is not too different, so I was easily able to find correspondence between the versions.
Later, Laurel was showing Ben how to set up a full-body IK. I joined them to see if there's something that I might learn. I was slightly surprised by how much I actually knew about it already. I found it very beneficial to discuss different techniques and ways the rig might be modified. It was really frustrating and bewildering to see that after we set up the rig Maya would not show the handles that are supposed to be used to modify the model. Ben ended up working with it "blindfolded": you try to change the model as if the handles were there.
Today we also had a meeting with Jessica, during which we brainstormed the scenes and the characters that we'd like to animate. We also discussed the various techniques that we will explore and the ways we can approach the problem. It was a very productive meeting where we considerably narrowed down our project.
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