Working with Quads
My approach to modeling, like that of many others, is to work only with quads A quad is a polygon that is made up of four points that generally but not always assume a rectangular shape see Figure 2-1 . There is much debate as to the validity of quad-only modeling. Also, working with quads is a bit more difficult than working with triangles, and maintaining a mesh that contains only quads can be quite tricky for the novice. However, I firmly believe that using this method makes you a better...
The Arm
So let's get moving. We'll begin with the arm. At this point we still 1. With the geometry selected, choose Mesh Sculpt Geometry Tool v7 Edit Polygons Sculpt Geometry Tool . We'll start out using the Pull operation. Set Auto Smooth to 4 and Max Displacement to 0.15. 2. Beginning at the forearm, touch and release the geometry, trying to follow the direction of the edges. Continue around the entire forearm, making sure to rotate and check the geometry from numerous perspective views. If there are...
Gary Oliverio
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maya 8 Character Modeling by Gary Oliverio p. cm. ISBN-10 1-59822-020-9 pbk., companion cd 1. Computer animation. 2. Maya Computer file . 3. Three-dimensional display systems. I. Title. TR897.7.O44 2006 2007, Wordware Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved 1100 Summit Avenue, Suite 102 Plano, Texas 75074 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from Wordware Publishing, Inc. Printed in the...
Normals
When we refer to soft edges we are not talking about smoothing. Depending on your settings, an object such as a sphere may appear to have a hard edge surrounding each face, giving it that disco ball appearance. This is referred to as faceted. In order to get rid of those hard edges, we need to soften them. We do so by adjusting normals in this case, Normals Soften Edge v7 Polygons Normals . Normals play a very important role in the 3D realm but are often ignored, especially by the novice user....
Object and World Coordinates
For some of you this might be obvious, but if you are relatively wet behind the ears, you really need to know the difference between world coordinates and object coordinates. Take a look in the lower left-hand corner of any viewport. You should see a little XYZ thingamabob. This is actually your world coordinates. It shows you where the XYZ axes are pointing in relation to the camera you are currently looking through. 1. Quickly create a cube. Select it and apply the Move Manipulator by...
Texturing the Head
Now that we have our UVs, it's time to create some textures for our model. We will be creating three standard textures a color map, a bump map, and a specular map. Short of subsurface scattering, these three textures combined create a pretty convincing-looking character. For this particular section you will need a pretty decent paint program. I will be referring to the Photoshop tool set exclusively. If there is one universal tool in this industry, it's Photoshop. For the most part, I will...
Blocking out the Body
1. Before we start, choose Edit Mesh Keep Faces Together v7 Polygons Tool Options Keep Faces Together and make sure there is a check mark next to Keep Faces Together. This will ensure that your faces will remain together when you extrude. 2. We will start the building process with a simple cube. First select Create Polygon Primitives and uncheck Interactive Creation on the bottom of the panel. This will default to the old Maya standard of creating the geometry at the origin. Select Create...
Cant Get a Hard Edge
One other issue that seems to pop up quite often is adding sharp detail to a smoothed model, such as adding the hard edge of a belt that looks like it is a separate piece of geometry when it is actually part of the original mesh. The smoothing algorithms in Maya or any other software for that matter always want to round out the surface of the geometry, thus giving it that organic quality. Maya will draw a curved surface between all edges when the smooth node is applied. The smaller the distance...
Shaping the Nose
We should now have enough geometry to define the shape of the nose. 1. In a perspective view, use the Sculpt Geometry tool to smooth out the bridge of the nose so that it flows smoothly into the cheek of your model. Avoiding the centerline, zoom in close and use a smaller brush size to get the desired results. 2. Since we added additional geometry in a side view, we need to adjust the points so that we match the profile of the nose, making sure to account for the rise of the nostril. 3. Now in...
The Tongue
We can create a very serviceable tongue with very little effort. Although the tongue plays a major role in the way we speak, it is really just an added bonus when it comes to modeling a character. For the most part the tongue won't be visible, even during speech. The tongue is used primarily when an l or th sound is involved, and even then it isn't visible to the viewer. Unless you need your character to lick its lips, you really don't even need a tongue. But I always lean toward the safer than...
Keep It Clean
Before we get cracking on an actual character model, I would like to discuss a few modeling basics that I will refer to throughout the book. First off, I want to stress the concept of working clean. What I mean by this is keeping your scene free of all extraneous nodes. Maya is notorious for keeping around nodes that are no longer useful to your scene. This increases your file size dramatically. A quick way to remove these dead nodes is to use the mhClearDead-Nodes.mel script available on the...
A Bit about Blend Shapes
I mentioned blend shapes earlier in this chapter, so I feel you deserve a bit of explanation as to how they are used. For some of you, this might be obvious, but once again, let's not forget about the newbs Blend shapes are used most often to create facial animation. In this case, you create duplicate geometries and move the vertices on the duplicate to form a variety of facial expressions. When the blend shapes are applied to the original geometry, Maya takes into account the offset of the...
The Hips and Abdomen
1. Let's move over to the hip. The top of the pelvis the iliac crest will protrude slightly. Nudge it out in the front a bit as well. 2. Move around to the lower abdomen and give it a bit of a bulge. Bulge out the pubic bone a bit as well. 3. Moving up, define the upper abs, creating a slight indent near the right side of the stomach. Don't concern yourself with the navel at this point. 4. To accentuate the rib cage add a bulge to the right of center and then a bit in the center of the model.
Placing the Teeth and Tongue
Let's do some final cleanup before we save the file. 1. Select the top teeth and gums and select Mesh Combine v7 Polygons Combine . Name the new object UpperTeeth. 2. Select the bottom teeth and gums and combine them as well. Name the group LowerTeeth. 3. Select the UpperTeeth, LowerTeeth, and the tongue, then select Edit Group. Name the group something like Teeth or Mouth. 4. Select ImagePlane1 in the Outliner and delete it. We won't be needing it for the next step. 5. Save the file as Teeth,...
Crafting the Figure
Refer to Chapter_9 on the companion CD. Now that we have made it past the head, we need to focus on fleshing out the body no pun intended . So let's take a look at where we left off with the character. To this point we have more or less been concerned only with the mass of our figure. The majority of edge loops are there simply to dictate the general shape. So the next thing we need to do is start adding edge loops that follow more along the lines of the muscle structure. This is the stage of...
The Foot
Now that the hand is complete, unhide the geometry and rotate it back into its original position to begin work on the foot. We will step ha, ha get it foot step through the process in much the same way we did the hand. As I mentioned earlier in the book, we will be tackling the foot in more detail by adding toes. For the most part, the characters I build have some sort of footwear. It is rare to see a character with bare feet. The exception may be some sort of creature like a woodland tree...
Edge Loops
Edge loops. Come on, say it with me edge loops Don't know what an edge loop is By the end of this book you will be dreaming about them, my friend An edge loop is a continuous edge that loops around the muscle contours of the character's body. You will find that if your geometry follows the muscle structure, your model will animate considerably better. This is especially evident in facial animation. Without edge loops following the muscle groupings in the face, there will be noticeable problems...
The Teeth
1. Let's start by opening Chapter8_start.mb from the companion CD. You'll see that we have an image plane that shows the teeth from a front view. If the image doesn't show up, you can load it in from the Chapter 8 sourceimages folder. Lucky for you, I took the liberty of sizing the image so that it matches the scale of your model Let's take a quick moment to discuss the teeth. Teeth basically come in three shapes and sizes. We have the incisors, which are the four teeth in the front. Next are...
Placing the Arm and Hand Joints
We will take a little different approach in laying out the joints for our arm. Ideally, we want to make sure that the joints are in a straight line. Obviously, the arms of our model were built at more or less a 45-degree angle. So, in order to get the arm joints as straight as possible, we will rotate both the skeleton and the geometry so that we can accurately place the arm joints in a straight line. First off, we will temporarily group the skeleton and the geometry to ensure that we are...
The Hand
1. So, let's start with a little prep work. You can open Chapter10_start.mb from the companion CD. It contains a new image plane for the hand that references Lucy_hand.jpg in the Chapter 10 sourceimages folder. 2. For now we can hide the mirrored geometry and concentrate solely on the original. With your geometry selected, rotate the model 35 degrees on the Z-axis. This should put the model in a good position to work on the hand. We want the hand to be parallel to the ground plane. 3. To make...
Painting the Weights
Let's start with the legs. First we'll set up a simple animation so that we can see the deformation of the knee as the pelvis moves up and down. We will use the controllers we created in the previous chapter also available on the CD in Chapter 14 scenes . 1. At the bottom of the screen under the Time Slider you will see two boxes on the left and two boxes on the right, each containing numeric entries. The boxes on the left indicate the frame in which the animation begins. The boxes to the right...
Lucy Body Front.jpg
Refer to Chapter_4 on the companion CD. We first need to set up our reference. Whether you base your model on a skeleton or images is really up to you. I'll try to facilitate both approaches where it seems necessary. For example, when we model the details of the head, the photo reference will give us more bang for the buck. You can use the reference skeleton and photos provided on the companion CD or use your own. We will now set up our image planes for our photo reference. If you are already...
The Secret Formula
I believe in and rely on formula. I always begin a model the same way, regardless of what type of character I am creating. There are many advantages to modeling by formula, and the more you make a practice of this method, the easier it becomes. This also decreases the amount of time spent on the blocking out process in character modeling. A character model should be built the same way you would draw it. When you draw, you sketch out a basic mass for the character before you begin fleshing it...
The Sculpt Geometry Tool
The Sculpt Geometry tool is going to play a major role in our modeling approach in this book. At certain intervals we will use this tool to aid in the modeling process. I use this tool a great deal in order to achieve the smooth organic form of the human body. As you learn to control the sculpting tool you will become very proficient in fleshing out your character in a short amount of time. This is, however, probably one of the hardest tools to utilize to your advantage, especially in the...
Modeling Reference Guides
Using front and side view image planes or a skeleton on which to base your modeling is usually the best approach your body proportions are then clearly defined. An image plane is the projection of an image in a particular viewport. If you are unfamiliar with the use of image planes, the process is covered in Chapter 4 Beginning the Modeling Process. When using image planes it is important to have high-quality reference images. Whether they are drawings or actual photos is determined by what...
The Eye Socket
Back when we started this whole mess, we talked a bit about having to compensate for using photos as our reference. Basically, since any photo you take has perspective, you can't always rely exclusively on the photo when adjusting geometry. The eyes are one of those features that tend to get distorted in photos, so we need to compensate for this as we move forward. We'll discuss a few tricks to compensate for these issues in Chapter 11. We should also look to some of the reference photos of the...
The Breasts
Now we need to go in and define the chest. We have intentionally waited to the end of the fleshing out phase to tackle this area. The breasts tend to be a difficult area to nail down. All too often we see the comic book approach to breasts. You know the kind that defy gravity. To the dismay of some, we are going to lean toward a more natural and realistic approach for our model with a touch of artistic license. The important factor to achieving a natural look to the breasts is to remember that...
The Clavicles and Neck
When we built the head of our character we did a little preliminary work around the neck. Now, as we form the clavicles, we will address the neck in finer detail. The clavicles, in a similar fashion to the scapula, move considerably in relation to the movement of the arms. Because of that, they can be more prominently visible in certain positions and less so in others. Once again we'll take the middle ground approach and model them so that they look acceptable regardless of the position they...
The Legs
1. Next, we'll move down to the thigh. Bulge out the front of the thigh so that it slightly overlaps the knee on the right. Also expand the thigh between the legs as well as the outer side. 2. Now beneath that create a bulge for the knee. 3. Give the inner thigh a slight rise, ending at a bulge on the inside of the knee. 4. Expand the inside and outside of the calf. 5. Create a bulge down the front of the calf to create the shin bone. Go back in with the Smooth operation to soften it up. 6....
The Butt
1. Move down to the butt and switch back and forth between the Pull and Smooth operations. Be sure to refer to the mirrored side in a three-quarter view to get the form correct. 2. Take the sculpt as far as you can at this point to shape the posterior. This is an area that requires going back to the base mesh and moving points to get it to look as good as possible. 3. Let's remove the polySmoothFace node from our model. If you're not sure how to do this, refer to the section in Chapter 3 called...
Go Tools
Included on the companion CD are a handful of scripts. The one I would like to talk about a little here is the goModTools.mel script, which creates the custom Go Tools dialog see Figure 3-37 . Oftentimes when modeling you get in a groove and find that some of the smallest things seem to impede your progress. Well, this little script is designed to eliminate a lot of those issues by allowing you to access common commands quickly and easily from one toolbox. The toolbox itself is split up into...