Animation

I am supposed to chose which area of 3D modelling i am to focus on but seeing that i haven't learnt anything in-depth about animation. I decided to take animating instead of focusing on modelling which is what i really wanted to do because I think it is much better to have a well rounded skill set than to be focused one skill in this case.

At first glance it looked hard very hard to animate things but in reality the hard part is actually setting up the bones on a mesh and assigning the weights on the individual joints.

Here are the most basic terms of which you will need to know to understand what i am talking about

 As far as i know there are 4 types of skinning (applying weights) a model.

• Wheight painting - Is the old school method of skinning where you had to apply the weights onto individuall vetecies
• Smooth bind - an updated vesion of weight painting. You no longer need to paint in the weights indivirually and it binds the mesh and the bones smoothly. It doesit automatically but you might not get the wanted result
• Rigid bind - same as smoothbinding but more rough on the binding
• Interactive bind - This is where you can individually determine in what range the joints of the bones are going to affect the mesh

Maya's automatic skinning is ok and is really useful. I have also tried to manually apply the weights which gives you much better control over what part of the mesh is going to be affected by the joints and bones.

I managed to make my character do a posing animation using bones

I also made an animation sequence but i have no idea how to either export it in to a game or make it in to a movie... yet

Uv Mapping, My Old Friend

So we have started working with Uv-mapping in school and if you have read my posts on UV-mapping then you would know that UV stands for universal view. Simply put you have to layout you 3D model to a flat layer so that the parts of it would be distinguishable.

At start your UV mapping will look like this. A bunch of wires bunched together in chaos but soon when you will be able to tame and make everything distinguishable.

So since I have experience with mapping I'll show you the most basic tools that you will use while mapping.

1. Is the fancy unfold tool. It can only unfold one shell at a time and but the good thing about it is that you can see how the UVs become unfolded, right before your very eyes. (Thank you Joel for showing me this tool).

2. is the flip horizontal/ vertical tool. Best done when selecting individual shells.

3. The cut UV edges tool. this tool is crucial when you have a complicated shape like a character or something in with complicated shapes.

4. a less fancy unfold tool but you can unfold a lot of different shells at once.

5. level the vertices in either way the images is kind of self explanatory.

Lastly you should use the checkered texture to see if you have unfolded the UVs properly. The checkered texture should be evenly distributed.

Schools back!!

And that's why i haven't have the time to post for a long time. Homework and many stressful days has gone by since school has started again. But the good thing in my school is that  I am going to make a game in one of my courses. Naturally I am chosen as the designated 3d modeller, texturer and eventually animater.

Having this project will give me a clear set of goals on what to do and make. Also this forces me to go into areas of 3d modeling that I am not particularly familiar of, such as animation, rigging and rendering. Even now I continue to learn about modelling. 

Remember this; I'm not just saying it to you I'm also saying it to my future me incase I forget:

I solved the problem when scaling an edge loop in a special duplicated object. It is as simple as moving the pivot to the center of the body and viola! No more overlapping mirrors when scaling. 

When you are done with an object try the 'merge vertices' option It makes duplicate special ten times easier to finalize it also gets rid of all unnecessary/duplicated faces. 

I don't know how I have missed bit there is apparently a coordinate modifier where you can individually edit the coordinates of each vertex. It's the top left of the main window hiding somewhere in there

I'm really looking forward to learn everything that has to do with modeling... I just need time. Anyways. I've done alot of models during this past month and hopfully all of them are going in the game.

also I've been playing around the rendering options as well and this is what i came up with the help of mentalray .