Category: Maya Development

This week I needed to finalise my animation and render it out.

I started on working with the UV editor to perfect my textures, as some of them looked stretched out. I scaled the UV shells to line up with the texture, and this enabled them to look much more realistic on the pipes, and created consistancy on all the pipes in the animation.

I then perfected the texturing on the gears themselves too on the UV maps, and some minor colour correction.

Next, I noticed my animation didn’t have the perfect loop. Being that the textures were so detailed, you could tell the switch when the video ended to when it started due to the placement of the textures changing. I decided to avoid this I needed to make the gears turn a full 360 degrees so that the texture would arrive back in it’s original starting place at the end. I had to increase the animation to 160 frames to enable this as the animation was too fast if it was only 80 frames. I had to sync up all the gears to turn 360 degrees exactly, or 360 degrees plus 180/360 each round for the smaller gears. I then made sure the teeth linked together by editing the offest at the start and adding it on the the final translation at the end of the animation.

Being that my animation was longer now I needed to add more balls dropping and keep the ring turning. I duplicated the balls and animated them falling at the right time again. I also updated the ring animation to keep turing for the whole duration.

I was then ready to render my animation. After it was rendered I went into nuke to colour correct as it had rendered out lighter than anticipated.

This week I decided to add more elements to my design that I had researched last week. I also wanted to add more details such as realistic textures. I need practice with UVs specifically so I decided this would be great development for this project and for myself.

Firstly, I thought about details I could add which would make my animation make more sense in terms of practicality. I thought I needed to make a structure behind the gears as it didn’t make sense they would be able to turn against a wall. I decided to create a pipe structure behind them being this would also add more detail to the animation visually. I started by creating pipes on the walls in the edges, which would lead into the pipes on the gears. I then had to make three main pipes that would hold up the gears, and make connecting pipes to hold up the smaller gears.

I then made the pipes behind the gears more rounded, and it took a while of playing around with the pipes for them all to fit. I had to craft a different peice for the bottom left gear to connect to the pipe structure because of the width of the radius inside of the gear.

I then looked at texturing the pipes. I downloaded a metal texture that I could use for these, and opened the UV editor. I unwrapped the pipes and adjusted their positioning on the UV screen, and had ro scale it up so that the details were seen and the texture didn’t look stretched.

I initiallty wanted to go ahead with the pastel colour of this metal, however when inputted this into the scene it blended in too much with the background so I colour corrected the metal to be a light grey. I applied this to all the pipes on the gear structure also.

I then textured the gears. i wanted these to look more realistic and less superficial. I downlaoded a variety of worn metal textures as I wanted some variety and for not all the gears to look the same. I opened the UV editor for these and it was much more simple for the gears. I individually textured all of them and I just had to adjust the gear to be in the middle of the UV grid for these to work.

The animation now looked more realistic and had much more detail than before.

This week I made more progress on my feel good ‘dopamine’ animation. I decided I needed to add more elements to my design, sticking with the initial concept of the animation. I started by adding more gears, animating them all in sync. I varied the sizes and shapes of the new gears so it looked more interesting.

I then decided to add materials to the pipes and the balls. I made the pipes glass and the balls a jade material but with a purple hue. I felt like this colour pallete went aesthetically well with the copper circle they would fall through.

I then decided to add three plates as walls and a floor. I thought this would give the animation a more contained and neat look, and also meant I could use the factory hdri as a slight, not overly visible, but subtle reflection so we could see more of it but not take away from the main component of the animation.

I then thought about how I could fill the emty space, as this animation achieved what I wanted however it didn’t feel complete. I found this compilation of satifying 3D animation and thought what I could do next week to develop the design and background of this animation.

I really like the ideas of having something on the walls or everyday objects around the model to make the peice more full and busy, making sure it isn’t overly busy and still simple.

This week we started a new project of a ‘feel good’ animation. There are famous loop videos online of satisfying 3D animation, and our task is to design and animate our own.

To help create these sorts of animation, we were introduced to the MASH tool in maya. We tried it out with some cubes first, I input 10 features, meaning 10 cubes appeared next to my original cube I had placed.

You then can change the scale and rotation of X, Y and Z, and these can tthen be keyed, making animation of various objects much easier to make synched.

I then started thinking about my design for my feel good animation. I really liked the idea of working with gears for this project and making a satisfying mechanical device animation. I started researching inspiration for this idea. I really liked the idea of many gears working together to move something, but also liked the more complex ideas of things fitting into eachother and the balls wokring with the gears.

I started modelling some components I could use in my animation. I made a gear from a pipe polygon, however was soon to learn that there were gears by defult in the polygon primitives section. I also made a spring from a helix polygon, I adjusted it to be more tin like a spring and increased the coils on it.

I then worked on placing two gears next to eachother and fitting the teeth together, making sure when this was animated they placed correctly together.

I then experimented more using MASH with the springs element. I increased the features to 5 springs and changed the pivot point the the end of the curve line of the springs. This way, the MASH animation of the springs stemmed from the bottom of the helix, and was more accurate to the movement of a spring. The animation was simply a scale up to reselmble the spring popping up and then a side to side wobble after this.

I then thought more about what I could add to the gear function. I thought about adding balls going in and out of the gear holes, and played around with this idea. I animated one and then decided to add another gear and add another two balls going in and out of all the gear holes and meeting in the middle. I made dure to edit the animation on the graph editor to make sure the tangents were curved so the animation was smooth. I did this by clicking the hill-like icon at the top bar of the editor on each tangent.

Work from home

I decided to download a HDRI to input into my scene for the lighting, so I could see how this would render out as I went along. I found a fitting background of a machinery interior, this however is too distracting to be in the background visibility when rendered.

I then decided to add some details and textures to my gears. I extruded some edges and added edge loops, I also played with the radius of some of the gears.

I had a turning point here at my design and decided to scrap the balls and the springs in my animation. I wanted to stick to the design being simple and satisying. I started researching more and found this animation that I could take from.

I extruded part of my first gear and created a pipe with a hollow circle at the end. I then created a pipe below and above where the balls would fall from and into. I then did a simple animation of the balls falling through at the perfect moment where the circle is open.

I then added materials such as metal and copper on the gears and the turning circle.

This was a good initial start and I like the idea more, but I will add more elements to this animation.

This week I was absent due to attending a funeral with my family.

I was informed the class worked on rendering their Rube Goldberg machine which luckily I had already done so I didn’t miss out on new content.

This week we animated the camera movement and rendered out our Rube Goldberg machine.

With my model and bullet animation completed, I looked toward creating a camera and animating this for rendering. In terms of ‘animation’, this is for the movement we will see through the lens in the render. I first created a camera and placed in infront of my machine.

I then looked at the view through the camera on the viewport, this is a way to make sure it is following the ball when we animate the movement. I then, using key frames, animated the movement to follow the ball, and created a loop by copy and pasting key frames from the very start to the very end.

I then decided to add details such as bubbles coming from a pipe at the top to make more of a factory look. I did this by animating bubbles using key frames rising from the pipe.

I was then ready to render, making sure it was rendering from the camera lens. First attempt at rendering was super slow, but then I tried switching it to render through GPU, this made it 10x quicker.

This week we developed our Rube Goldberg machines. I started to continue on from last week and create more elements to my machine.

I decided I wanted to make a ball that went down an obstacle course and then through a ‘bubble machine’ and floated up as a bubble, and make it a satisfying loop.

Firstly I started on the physics design. I wanted to create something simple, but satisfying, that would also work well with my bubble machine design. I kept the original animation made with bullet from last week as the starting point, and added two passive rigid body slides the bubble would fall into. I then made a twist slide the bubble would go through and made it a hollow passive rigid body to make this possible.

I then did the same thing to two more slides that the bubble would pass through, and started making the design for the main element of the bubble machine.

Here I baked my animation so no aprt of the design process would mess the animation up. I then started focusing more on what my design would look like, I decided a pastel pallete, and a cute aesthetic would fit this machine. I added a bubble background image for the machine and added coloured surfaces to each part of my model. These included chrime, plastic and frosted glass. I also added a bubble texture to the ball itself.

I then added a ‘clear water’ texture to the window of my bubble machine so it would create the illusion of a bubble being made.

I also added details like the metal pipe the bubble would come out of.

Work from home

My task for myself this week was to complete the machine ready for the camera rendering next week. I felt I needed to add more detail to this machine as the actual physics were quite simplistic.

I found the perfect hdri background and lighting source on Poly Haven. It is a pastel power plant, which was exactly the aesthetic I wanted.

I wanted to add a sign for the machine and the little bubble machine. I found a bubble font I liked and then made 3D text to input on top of my model and on top of my bubble machine.

I then added a foam border to my machine, making it look neater more complete. I also rounded off the dominoes at the start, and also did this to the slides, making a more bubbly look for all of the machine components. I played around with texturing also, and finalised any errors on my geometry.

I then added an animation of bubbles coming out of a pipe at the top of the whole machine for the whole animation, just for an added effect.

To start this module off, we started looking at more advanced VFX work on maya, the first being a tool called ‘Bullet’.

Before exploring this tool however, we practiced the animation skills we would need for later. We created a stairs and a sphere to represent a ball that would be seen to be falling down the stairs.

We then made the animation on the animation graph editor as this way we can edit the exact bounces it would make by adjusting the X and Y marks it would change as it went down. We did this by breaking the tangents on new set keys so we could adjust the angles of whihc it would be falling at and make them all similar.

I had to edit my graph and make the curves more exaggerated so that the ball would bounce more.

We then added another ball next to it, and applied the same methid but this time adding a more flat fall.

We added a background lighting and made a playback blast to document how this ended up looking,

The Bullet tool helps you create movement and direct animations of shapes colliding with other shapes. The two main functions of this tool is ‘active’ and ‘passive’ rigid bodies. Passive being something that makes the shape almost like a wall, a surface that doesn’t move, active being one that falls and collides with other active bodies, or against passive bodies.

We first tried just creating a cube, rising it above ground, making it an active rigid body and then playing the animation.

The cube fell and bounced off the ground. We then created a slightly more complex practice model of a ball colliding with dominoes, subsequently knocking them over. For this we had to make sure the sphere was an active rigid body, it’s collider shape was set to sphere, and that the slope the ball fell down, the plate for the ground and the dominoes were all passive rigid bodies.

I also added an active body of another sphere to delevop this animation of a cause and effect chain.

Work From Home

We were told in the forthcoming weeks we had to develop design ideas for a simailar but more complex Rube Goldberg machine project we were going to create with bullet. I researched some design ideas and physics ideas for what I could create.

I decided I really liked the idea of playing with gravity and a loop system to create a satifying factory like machine. When I thought about playing with gravity and reversing it, I then thought of a floating ball, perhaps a bubble I could incorperate wihin this.

When looking at design ideas for a Rube Goldberg machine to do with bubbles, I was inspired by a pastel colour pallette, with the idea of a ‘bubble maker’ incorperated which created the solid bubble to float somehere in the animation. I decided this would be what I would develop within this project.