Progression of Animation Assets Journal

20th September 2016

In these two lessons I was trying to make more assets and add them into my scene mainly. I started off very slowly as I opened my Maya to find that my chair and cushion and a few alterations did not save for some reason. So I quickly re modelled them and made them from scratch to just get back to where I was. Once again I extruded from a single block selecting different faces every time. This was a slight problem as it also meant that the teddy bear that I started to model at home wasn't their either. To prevent this from happening again I'm going to always save it to my USB and then at the end of each lesson replace the old files with the new updated ones from my USB but additionally I'm going to model all new assets in their own project so that if one doesn't save for any reason I haven't lost everything.

I also touched up on my older assets that I created before summer one being my globe. I had an idea of it being on the desk and the bottom remaining stationary but the actual earth detaching from the base and floating away. To make it more realistic I wanted a hole to be made in the base to act as where it would slot in and to do this I had to select the earth and then the base and go to 'mesh' and then booleans and had to select 'difference'. This worked but also got rid of the shape so I had to duplicate the asset.

 

The bottle I also added in to sit along side my cola bottle but I made it tilt in preparation for if I am able to add in a liquid. To import them in I simply pressed cmd+I and then selected the scene in but I then had to alter the size and scale.

Then to act as a filler as I felt that my room was a bit bare as my assets are fairly small so I duplicated my chair twice and one other cushion that I altered a little bit. I also then changed to texture by altering its colour and refractions ect.

Progression Update Animation

My scene is finally coming together with my assets all being placed into one scene apart from my teddy one. This has allowed me to have an actual view on what I need to change, alter or add to make and overall 'Wow' atmosphere. I have now been mainly working on FX rather than modelling as this is where I play around with the gravity and the actual animation of my assets where I make the objects float and look like a zero gravity scene. I am happy with the way my assets move as I think I have made a good effort when it comes to the way in which they defy gravity in different directions. One problem I have recently came across once again is not being able to view my assets and how they look with the animations all together because it is so slow to the point where it only loads 2-3 frames and then doesn't seem to load any more. This problem I have had throughout but not exactly to this extent and to resolve this, once I was completely happy with the way my asset looked I have to delete its history. By deleting an objects history it means that you cannot cmd+Z which is a short cut to undo or redo things and so you can't go back. This meant that I have to completely finish a asset before I do this and make sure I am happy with its looks but also see whether or not it is practical and work when I add gravity to it. An example of where I have done this is for my photo frame. Once I had modelled it and tested out how it looked I combined all the separate polygons so that it was one shape or object. Once it was all one and combined using booleans union, I could then delete its history. This decreases the amount of memory used and allows Maya to run faster.

To delete your history you have to select your object and then open channel editor, which can be opened in the Windows tab, and it shows the oldest 'nodes' first and you go over to 'edit' and then click on 'delete node'.

Another problem I came across in this lesson is that my teddy started to bug out a little bit for some unknown reason. So what I did was go to where I made hinges to allow its limbs to move and re-made them. This seemed to fix the problem and so next lesson or at a later date it is ready to import into my scene.

Having said this, I have done this to allow my assets within my master scene and still continues to have this problem and so I have had to work through it the only problem is that I am estimating (Hoping!) that the fields and solvers that I'm adding are correct and actually work however sometimes Maya can be funny so what I'm going to have to do is try and export my scene multiple times as a way to see how my assets are floating and what needs changing. This will be a lengthy process but no doubt ill be able to see how they actually look.

Final Touches 

Once I felt I was happy with the overall out come having changed a lot of things throughout its fair to say that I have come a long way. One of the biggest changes being switching from the hard to work with gravityapplication which I understand is good for certain things, but when it comes to trying to immitate gravity in a video game situation I feel like keyframing allows me to have full control of where something is at any given time and I felt like I had a lot more freedom.

Some smaller touches that I made were actually having some of my objects appearing to bounce off each other. This is something I forgot about on the change over as when applying a field and or solver which is where the gravity was, you make the assets such as my blocks all active or passive meaning that when they collide they use physics and actually have a cause and effect. This however was not the case with keyframing but wasn't much of a problem as I could simply go to the keyframe where they meet and change their paths. An example of my first export where I didn't do this can be seen below on the cube that manages to go through the wall!

Another thing I did was just re arrange some of my assets, this required me to re export the selected assets and then change its position as it still wouldnt let me move anything that was key frammed and so once I had moved it a little I re imported the assets and they were fine. The reason I did this was to give my room a slightly fuller look as originally I wanted the room to be spacious to appeal to the target audience as science fiction games I feel are usually modern and efficient with space but when it came down to it, it looked empty and so these adjustments still kept it clean but also more intresting.