Rigging 101

This week in Maya I learned how to rig a fish. During the rigging process I learned the basics of how to make a bone structure in Maya and bind it to a mesh. Sadly, I have to admit that I did find the rigging process to be slightly easier in Maya compared to rigging in 3ds Max.

Yellow Submarine

This week in Maya I learned how to make and edit nurbs objects. They are great to work with because they have fewer segmentation to work with, compared to polygonal objects, to obtain a smooth look with your model. The first thing that I tried making was a cartoon style submarine. The hull of the sub. was made from a sphere which was edited using the hull tool, which is equivalent to selecting edge loops for polygonal objects. The red and yellow rings were cylinders that had there vertices pulled in to fit the curve of the hull.

Propulsion Gel

This week Max I modeled a space ship that is propelled through space by ejecting out bio waste. The space ship's hull started out as a simple box which I then modeled as an editable poly. The star field and propulsion gel are made particle systems.

Mystical Meadow

This week in Maya I learned the basics, well I learned how to transition from 3ds Max to Maya. It's not to much different but the way that everything is laid out is going to take some getting used to, plus I kept trying to use 3ds Max hotkeys in Maya which for the most part did nothing. The above image is a Mystical Meadow with nice green grass, multi colored crystals, and a little fog moving through the grass. To make this scene I used the paint brushes from the PaintEffects shelf in Maya which has a handful of 3d objects that you can paint onto your scene.

Deep Space Expedition

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!                                              !(Do you get it? It is a big space)

This week was the week I have been waiting for, I got to see what everyone else has been working on and I got to present my video. The main goal that I had set, other than teaching someone about black holes  was for me to try and learn all sort of ways to use particle systems. I used the Super Spray, PF Source, and PArray particle systems to make all the visible components, that interact with the black hole. More importantly, this week signifies the end of 3ds Max and the beginning of Maya. Starting next week and continuing on into the near future will be the posting of work done in Maya, another Autodesk product that is similar to 3ds Max.

Render Render Render

This week in max the science animation has finally come to its closing. The finished video will be shown in next weeks post after the class presentations. Over the course of this past week, I attempted to polish up the animation for final rendering; however, my least favorite thing in max happened a little more than 10 times which is the crashing of the program (shown in the screen shot above). The image below, on the other hand, is what I was able to make in 3ds max while it was cooperating with me. When I was satisfied with the supernova part of my animation (the lower image), I spent the rest of the week simply rendering out the scenes and compiling them into the final video.

Planet Destruction

This week in max I tried to learn how to make the vortex tool work with meshes, i.e. planets, and what I found out was that it can't because the vortex only works with particle systems. I figured that there would be some way to make it work though because there are a seemingly endless amount of things you can create with max. What I found was the PArray particle system which can be used to copy the shape of any mesh. Then using the bind to space warps I bound the PArray to the vortex and was able to achieve whatis shown in the video above.