Category: Maya

This week, I modified the animation according to the reference. Just the mouth moving will be very stiff. I let the character’s neck move with the reference, adding a lot of details. In this way, the characters will be more vivid. Then I set up a scene in the car, lighting and rendering the characters and scenes again. Then I combined characters, scenes and rain materials in Nuke. From this exercise, I found many improvements and practices. For example, the animation of characters needs more detailed binding in order to make the animation more natural.

This week’s class was very interesting. We looked at mouth shapes and needed to make a short animation based on a video. Because there is no facial binding, we need to use the blend shape to create different mouth shapes and allow movement of the face muscles, eyes and eyebrows. With these steps, we can make the avatar animation be more natural. Furthermore, we need to import the video and audio into maya to make the animation fit the reference better. Then animate each frame according to the speed and content of the reference.

This week’s lesson continues with binding and skin weight modification.  While the simple binding only makes the avatar open mouth, we can add the blend shape to the binding in order to add facial expression and details. For example, when the head opens its mouth, it can make the face a little sunken to make it more natural. At the same time, we can use sculpting tools to enrich the expression. I rendered a small animation to test the binding and blend shape I made.

Binding characters are most commonly used in the animation process, because if a character needs animation, the binding artist must bind the character comprehensively. The main tasks involved in the character binding process are creating bones, adjusting the axis of bones, binding, skinning, and so on. Create a skeleton for the character model. The skeleton should be created in accordance with the movement rules and physiological structure of the character. Facial binding includes bone setting, character weight drawing and expression making. This week, we only made a simple bone binding for the head model, which allows the model to open its mouth.

After Binding the skeleton, we need to improve the skin weight in order to let the character have the natural movements. We need to give each bone the right skin weight. This part is a little difficult, so we have to have more patience to make the skin weight be more better.

We also built the models of teeth.

The main content of this week’s class is to divide UV and make material for the avatar model made last week. I have some personal experience in both areas. When I divide the UV of the model, I first select all the faces of the model and use the camera-based tool, then use the cut tool to divide the UV area on the lines of the model, and use the unfold tool to unfold the face of the model.

Then, I like to create textures in the substance painter. Because the material diagram which the teacher gave us was not consistent with the uv of my model. If I used the texture map directly on the model I made, all the details would be ectopic. So I used the original texture map to create a new texture map in substance painter.