Brad Robertson VFX

I wanted to build a small little Inukshuk for my scene in my work to populate my scene more with small things to make it seem more populated. An Inukshuk being a small rocklike statue used to identify northern paths. Included are a couple small reference photos from google images

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i started with simply pulling around verticies on a cube in random positions to give it a more random feel, and then used the sculpting tool to pull apart the mesh a bit and move it around to make it look more organic. I then went to polyhaven and grabbed some rock textures and made the bump map set to a very high value. I went through many different iterations of what i wanted the rock to look like but settled on a mossy rock texture.

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I then went about trying to fix the UV’s, as some of them were slightly broken. I tried to use camera based UV’s when possible and make cuts along the bottom where the seams wouldn’t be seen as much when needed, especially on the rocks that were longer, though some didn’t need this as their shapes were fairly simple.

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This was looking fairly good, so i made a very small plaque for it to sit on with a shiny wood finsh and implemented it into my scene.

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This looked good but there was some issues still with the UV’s. i ended up using a bit of the smooth mesh tools and the smooth UV Tools to clean up some of the glaring uv tools and moving some of the UV’s as some of them were looking too similar on some of the rocks on the lefthand leg.

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Finally i fixed some of these issues and implemented it back into my scene, where i was much happier with it.

In these two weeks, we were given a simple head and worked with rigging and animating the head using parent constraints and blend shapes. We started by adding in some very simple and small blend shapes like furrowing the brow and by using the sculpting tools with symmetry on

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After this i added in some small other blend shapes using the same technique done before, adding in a nasal and a grimace, making sure to use the soft selection tools when making the lips to not affect the entire area but only one surface so i could do each lip separately.

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I ended up going through a couple different shapes with the lips as i wasn’t quite getting very satisfied with the results, so i went in and used a lot of the smoothing tool to try and smooth out certain areas and pulling out certain areas to make creases in the face.

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After this i added in another small sulk to the character.

Then i went about lighting this so i could see it properly in the arnold viewport. I used a spotlight and had to change all of my textures to set as an AI Standard surface so that arnold would render these properly, i also had to adjust the lighting multiple times as i’ve found sometimes using spotlights that they really aren’t bright enough a lot of the time and had to crank the intensity up to a lot. I also removed all unused nodes to make sure the model wasn’t going to be using any unused textures and to just clean up the overall file.

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After this i went about creating a joint structure to move the head, and then binding the skin of the mesh to the actual joints to move it around.

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After this i also went about parenting things that weren’t attached to the headto the joint structure so they would still move accordingly, ie the eyes moving with the head, but made sure to tie the teeth to both the head controller for the top row and the jaw controller for the bottom row so they would open properly.

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This was great and all but unfortunately when moving the jaw, the face would warp due to have auto generated weights around the joints. Admittedly i’m not great at doing weight painting, though i did a fair amount of practice by failing so many times, especially when failing to get the mouth to open properly. The key of this was to switch between the addative and smoothing options and tweaking the opacity. With painting these, the head shape needed to be half of the top portion of the jaw, and the jaw controller needed to be the lower jaw to the neck, with the smoothhing being in between the cheeks, then using selection tools and hammering verts that wouldn’t cooperate properly to average out their position and weight.

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After this i used some simple circle splines to create controllers for the head, then zero’d them out by deleting the history and freezing them and constrained them to the joints, making sure to keep an intact hieracrchy.

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Next i went about making a lip shape that would make a puh effect when going past a certain point on the z rotation. i did this by learning how to use the drive keys to essentially make two different objects affect the other in different ways, for example a rotation of one sphere affecting the scale of the other.

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After this i went about creating some blinking face shapes, using the soft selection tool to grab certain faces and morph them to making the eyelids close.

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After this i rendered out a couple small frames of the face shapes.

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Next we learned about some of the ways that certain things in terms of rendering work in maya. Using four spheres with different textures to illustrate this, with using more samples to reduce graininess and increase light passes and refractions. I also learned about using subsurface texturing to have light pass between an object if it was thin enough, an example being how light hits your ear and passes through and is coloured red by the blood in the ear. I used this to make a subsurface map in photoshop that would appear under the skin when light would hit it hard.

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We next went about creating a character and rigging it for animation purposes. I created a head and torso out of simple squares, and made sure to keep these all grouped in a parent structure in which affecting one would affect all others in said group, also making sure to change pivot points as to where it would make sense for a body part to rotate from.

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The arms follow a hierarchy in when the parents moves, the children must move along with them, an example being if the arm moves then the forearm, hand and fingers must move with them.

Next i went about building some legs for the character. After which was the much harder portion of using bones to make a leg structure to build a way for the legs to move as opposed to a parenting structure used on the arms.

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These joints had a similar parent child hierarchy to before, and were paired with

I also mirrored the joints to make a secondary leg and simply set on to Hips L instead of Hips R. I then created a hip joint and constrained both legs to the hip joint. This would make the hierarchy have it where the pivot points from the bones would all work downwards.

I started creating some IK Handles, in which moving one joint to another would move the joints in between, for example moving the ankle joint would then move the knee joint inbetween the ankle and hip joints.

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I then made a simple circle spline and used this as a hip controller, parent constraining it to the hips so that i could use a spline to then control the IK Chain instead of grabbing individual pivots and moving those. While both work, samply grabbing larger splines would be easier.

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After our professor, Nick had taught us these concepts he gave us a fully rigged model with all the handles and parenting completed for us to use in works of animation. I Went about using the same techinques learned in the previous lesson and also the techniques used in the physics animation of easing keyframes to create a smoother, realistic animation in which i could have the character properly pick up a ball, slowing down in certain parts and speeding up in others, specifically having him slow as he crouched and having him speed up on the height of him standing up. Making sure to always rotate the splines as joints would rotate and not move on a human being. I also tried to use a very slight movement in the right leg pivoting to make the movement of knees separating when the character bends down.

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I had a decent animation, but it could still use some tweaking and wasnt actually picking up the ball at all.

I fixed this by making it so that when the character’s hand goes over the ball, between one frame it would toggle the ball and constrain it to the hand inbetween two keyframes being on and off

After this i had a much better animation going.

Then i added some simple textures and made a full render, adding a chrome texture to the sphere being picked up.

I started this practice with going about doing this by making a staircase, this was as simple as making a stair spline in the viewport and then using the CV Curve tool to build up and then make a loft out of the two splines.

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Next i went about using a combination of the graph editor and the the viewport to start adding in keyframes to making a sphere move down the stairs. Right now there was only two keyframes, one at the top of the stairs and one at the bottom affecting only the y and X coordinates.

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I then started adding in some keyframes to the y coordinates for it to start going down the stairs.

However this was looking extremely flat, so i started tweaking the interpolation of the Y keyframes to go from non linear to a drop off moreso to mimic the physics a dense object would have when falling down stairs.

I tweaked these keyframes a bit more as they were still very rigid using the graph editor, and was a bit more satisfied with the result.

Next i put in a second ball that would have a lot less density and have a lot higher bounce then the previous ball, i followed the same techniques but simply let the ball have a lot more time in air then the hard ball to give the appearance of a lot more weightlessness on the Y axis.

After this i went about adding in a rotating affect on both of these., i added a checker pattern on both so i’d be able to see the rotation, and simply used two keyframes with interpolation that would speed up at the start and slow down towards the end, giving the appearence of them both slowing down the rolling towards the end. I then went about rendering this out by going into the rendering workspace as opposed to animation and tweaking the render sequence to render out all existing frames as an EXR

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I then went into media encoder and converted this into an MP4 And was happy with the result on a simple animation physics test, though i think the animation could still use some more smoothing.