ANI212 - Week 5

2021-10-21/22

What? So what? Now what?

This week I worked finishing the cage model. I created one side of the cage then duplicated it for the other sides. For the front I cut out a hole for the door then cut small holes in it for the bars to sit in. I also rigged the door to a curve so I can easily animate it opening and closing.

Also this week I UV unwrapped my Daffy model and his prop sign. Most of the body was fairly easy but I had trouble with the legs since the bottom half of Daffy's legs are orange and the top is black and there is a hard, straight line in-between them that kept warping in a weird way at the back when I created and added a diffuse texture.

I completely redid the leg UVs turning the sides into one big UV shell and the line is much better, though still not perfect. The camera doesn't look at the back of Daffy's legs much anyway so it hopefully won't be an issue but if I can find a way to fix it then I will do that.

On Wednesday night I helped out Luke with UVing his Lego model since he was having a bit of trouble, I showed him how I did mine and how to export the UV snapshot to put in to Photoshop.

For Daffy's prop sign, I added the "Help!!!" text in Photoshop. Afterwards, I developed a shader to emulate the texture detail and surface imperfections for Lego plastic. I created a bump map in Maya using a noise node and baking it to a texture file in the Hypershade and found some fingerprint specular maps online. I combined the specular maps with a Composite node and then exported out the shader to send to Luka and Jahred. I ran them through how to set it up for their models and it worked out really nice. We just need to tweak it a bit so the fingerprints are a bit more subtle because they stand out quite easily depending on the lighting and the colour of the model.

Rigging Lecture Notes

In Friday's class Rafi gave us a lecture on how to rig our Lego models. After the lecture I decided to try rigging my Daffy model while waiting for Rafi to get to our group for a feedback session.

For the most part I followed everything step-by-step except for the pelvis where instead of grouping the pelvis parts and the legs into their own groups, I parented the Pelvis_Curve to the Main_Curve and each leg curve to the Main_Curve separately. This didn't break the rig and worked perfectly for me and also left the outliner looking cleaner and easy to see everything.

Since Daffy needs to hold the prop sign, I also incorporated it into the rig making a controller for the sign piece to swivel it and parented that to another controller for the whole prop. That curve was then constrained to the right hand curve so it moves when I move Daffy's hand.

Afterwards, I also did a ROM test to make sure the rig worked with animation.

Daffy_ROM_Test.mov

For the rest of the week, I am going to be in overdrive with UVing all my models. The outdoor environment also has not been started yet so I decided to do that part myself over the weekend. I plan to make a just few big rock formations that I can quickly scatter over the landscape to save time.

Once again our group will meet on Discord on Tuesday to make sure we will be able to meet the deadline.