Part 1

Week 8

Substance Painter, feels like photoshop

For this week we have been exploring the subject of texturing, for this we enter the Substance Painter program, which for me, as my title says, reminds me too much of Photoshop haha.

'' Ogres are like onions. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. '' - Shrek

And this for me is how photoshop works, layers, a lot of layers and apparently Substance has even more layers, since it is not only handling colors with effects per layer, but also the various maps alphas, normals, height, metallic, roughness, among others. During class our teacher (Hello Richard!) Gave us a little exercise for the house: go and take pictures of elements that have, in theory, several layers of textures, here is my object. (please click the image to look at it closer)

This is a close-up of the leg of some chairs in the park on a cold winter morning, if we begin to divide the textures we can notice: the chair is made of wood and it has been getting wet for several winters, the darkest part may be the part that the paint has fallen off. We could even assume that it had more than one coat of paint and protection for exterior wood, on top of all this we have a thin layer of ice that would soon melt.

Another experiment was with the Christmas spirit, I found these decorations that we do not use and tried to reproduce the textures one by one.

This experiment helped me to understand more about how the different layers are used in substance painter, however I had problems finding the combination of height that was adequate for the texture of the blue sphere. In addition, it is necessary to place the correct level of reflection on the fabric.

On top of all this I would need to put a layer of "used", since the head looks too "new".

Week 9

Everything coming together

This week we carried out an exercise in which we combined different programs, we will look part by part aspects in which we have to be very careful.

        Maya

Before exporting your model from Maya:

• Delete history
• Cleanup Mesh (looking for Ngons, Triangles, etc)
• Amount of topology
• Freeze Transformations
• Center Pivot
• Naming Conventions (poly groups)
• Un-used polygons (delete)
• Scale (Create -Measure Tools)
• Hypershader (Edit-Delete unused nodes)
• File -Optimized Scene Size

Maya UV mapping:

• If you can't see the poly-face (like is hiding between other polys, you dont need to put it ''big'' in your UV map.
• With your low poly you need to assign a different shader per UV shell and then put all UV's in one UVshell, High poly doesn't need UV mapping.
• Work in subP with the subdivided version, maching the attribute of the editor with the level of subdividing.

       Zbrush

• Import object in Subtool as OBJ or FBX
• Check for scale
• You can work with the whole object, but if you want to export separately you have to separate them in Subtool.
• Dynamesh is quite tricky to learn to control, save before doing anything ''dangerous'' and have copies.

    Substance Painter

• Open Gl for our normal maps, because is what we using in Maya. 
  
• The resolution is what we see, no what is going to be exported, this is to being able to work without crashing our pc.
• If we have multiple UV's when we import them to maya it would say the number of UV's (like for example, 4).

    Marmoset

• Select the bake option and add your high and low poly
• Select bake project-Geometry-Tangent Space- Maya, then Ouput-Format 16 Bits.
• THEN BAKE LIKE A CHEF.
•  Make sure Height is selected in Bake->Configure.

Week 10

Looking Good!

Let's imagine that we are finishing the project and now we must concentrate on our presentation.

For our animated presentation we can simply combine a camera with a curve and create a view around the character, something that can be done by following this incredible tutorial by Claudio Ramirez.

However, now comes an interesting challenge...

LIGHTS

Let me be honest for a second, I have a stormy past working with lights in photography. One of my teachers in the past didn't teach us anything in his class and when I got to the advanced class, I had to learn "on the fly" how all the lights worked in the studio in less than a week.

I DO NOT MISS WORKING WITH REAL LIGHTS, especially in my country where it is very hot, 3 lights in a small studio heat up in seconds and we had to have the air conditioning on full blast.

Personally I follow the advice of several incredible career partners, the talented Smokwart who hardly shares his work but believe me when I tell you his advice is gold. And Julito Shoots, who has an incredible art direction, learned a lot by working with him a few years ago.

One of the jobs that we always had to do before entering the photography room was to make a diagram of the location of the lights, which would be your main, secondary, filling light, etc.

While I was never good at these schemes, I have provided a great platform that anyone can practice with for free. 

The Online Lighting Diagram Creator.

When I studied my degree, one of the teachers who taught me the basics in lights was "Mau Pin", here I share an entry where he explains the MINIMUM they should know about lights, however it is only available in Spanish. (Unless you translate with google :) )

Jake Garn also does an incredible job explaining how to read, create and use these diagrams for reference, but for practical reasons I will place only one of his examples (original on his blog) using a diagram made by Kevin Kertz. 

How you can see lighting a scene not only depends on the amount and type of light, but also on the elements that will interact with the light.

When we incorporate this knowledge in Maya we find that we have a lot of control with only the lights but also blockers, also that the way we configure the lights will have a greater effect on our rendering. Without a doubt, my favorite feature when it comes to lights in Maya is that you can tell the program which elements should be affected by '' which lights ''.

During class this week we went into a couple of exercises related to lighting, these were some of my experiments.

Here we can see three special configurations: 

• The incorporation of transparency in the elements such as the lamp (Transmission)
• The '' shadow masks '' that can be added in the light without adding the element, like our light coming from a non-existent window with shutters. (AiGobo - Light with shapes)
• Converting an item such as a textured screen to a light emitter with a color gradient, like our TV.

I don't consider myself particularly good at lighting environments with multiple objects, so I liked the following exercise more since it was focused on a character, using Nika's rig with poses provided by our teacher.

Sad Nika :(

In general I wanted to make an environment of a sad music video type light, or theater exaggerating sadness, there is a subtle element that I love to use in the lighting of my drawings (and applicable for these exercises) is to change the tone of the shadow generated by the light, if you look at it in detail, you can see that Nika has a purple shadow on her clavicles.

However, something that I did not like was how the shadow of the head looked on her legs, I would like to soften the shadow, since for now it seems to me that the shadow is like wet water on her pants.

Angry Nika >:(

Anger is one of my favorite emotions to represent, in many countries it is said that there is nothing more dangerous than an angry Latina. I love studying the movement of the muscles in the face and having the sparkle in the eyes. In addition to adding an extra with the phrase "throwing fire through the mouth". Particularly with the lights, I used a few '' Point Lights'' in areas for her hands and closer to the eyes, also amplify the halo inside the mouth.

I would like to improve even more with a dim lighting behind the head, especially the tip of the hair, since you can't tell where the head ends.

Winter Break

HO HO HO, Grandma and Tank

At this time we officially start the major leagues, the two projects expected for this class, We have a Character Design and a Hard Modelling.

Character Design

If there was something that was clear to me, it was that I wanted to challenge myself with something that I have never done. I like to do many girls with traditional Honduran dresses, with braids and jewelry; but in this project I want to get into the creation of the most adorable thing in the world: a grandmother.

For her we collect MANY references of grannies from different perspectives, portrait photographs, 3D animations, 2D illustrations, in addition to other compilations of specific references of jewelry and traditional clothing. It should be noted that one of the greatest inspirations was the Disney movie Coco, where we can appreciate several designs of grandmothers and that also (for my birthday which was in November) I received as a gift the art book of the film.

EXTRA: on December 24 I was able to enjoy the new Encanto movie, based on a Colombian environment, although each country in Latin America has its own "freshness", we have a lot in common and it was beautiful to see the design of the dresses and the hairstyles, incredible reference for the Latin part.

Experimenting with the character, I was very indecisive between making a granny based on circles (a figure related to being more friendly) or between squares and triangles (for a stronger and more strict figure).

After reviewing the various references, I liked the idea of a strict grandmother, with a lot of makeup, jewelry and tall, one of those grandmothers who love to look their best, maybe the children of the town think she is a witch.

A couple of sketches of the process:

As you can see, the body process was based on a tall and slim lady, lots of jewelry and decorative elements; I was very indecisive with the hair, although the braids are usually my favorites, in this case I opted for a tied hair because 1. I could easily decorate the back of the head. and 2. The braids fought attention with the jewelry of the neck and ears, having the hair collected they are better appreciated and can even be seen in the silhouette.

The costumes are based on dresses from the hottest areas of the country, I wanted my grandmother to have enough confidence to "show skin." This is another reason why I have a catalog of references of grannies in bikini, curiously what has been harder to me the most is to find references from the upper back (I avoid going into the dark part of the internet).

Hard Modelling

In artistic terms, I have always preferred to work with characters, not machines, not buildings. So finding an element to carry out in this project was quite a challenge. Although my first idea was to work with the Rosalila temple in Copan, as I learned how Zbrush works, I saw that the level of difficulty would be very low (since I could make alpha stamps with the details and it would finish very quickly).

So reviewing my visual references of my favorite games, I came across a classic of classics, the SV-001 tank from Metal Slug, a game full of weapons, zombies, soldiers, powers, and many weird bosses.

While the design of the game was pixelated, there is a lot of art to the creation process with 3D diagrams, in addition to many toys. Being such a popular game, it was no surprise to find that other people have done this modeling before, so it helps me to compare the types of topology, as well as the proportions used. Culturaneogeo and Randohoohaas have a BEAUTIFUL recopilation of the original art book.

What should i do first?

The best thing for me in these cases is to work both projects at the same time, because getting lost in the details could cause me more problems to detect errors.

After having some conversations with the leader of the module and reviewing my class notes, I made this WELL SUMMARIZED concept map of the process to follow with both projects. (click for a better view!)

La Abue goes firts

Since she is a character designed by me, it is best to have a front and side view of her, taking care of proportions. I am still not completely sure in the choice of shoes.

It is very important to emphasize that one of my major references in the construction of my grandmother's body is with the book ''Anatomy For Sculptors'' by Uldis Zarins with Sandis Kondrats, from which you can find a lot of free content on their Artstation account.

Not feeling completely comfortable with Zbrush in the Blocking process (I don't like that I can't have different views at the same time) I did the blocking in Maya.

For the body I am focusing on the parts that will be visible with clothing, in this case the head, shoulders, some of the chest, a bit of the upper back, arms and hands. Hair and jewelry is something that I do not plan to work with Zbrush, but in Maya

For the dress I have been playing a lot with a flat sphere and the clothing dynamics that Zbrush has, in addition to the various brushes that contain clothing effect.

This was the result.

A bigger problem was that when I did the dynamash of the hands, the fingers stuck together. So I decided to create the hand following various tutorials, the one that helped me the most was that of J Hill.

A comparison of before and after. Still needs a lot of work to give her the granny look.

For now what I am creating are a few small variations before presenting it to my supervisor for feedback.

Chibi Tank

For the creation of the tank I had two creative processes, first I created the base of the tank and began to reinforce the edges to keep the shape (especially since some edges are more '' hard ''.

Then, on my first try, I tried to start creating the elements using the base of the tank, however this started to create problems with the topology, especially when I started laying the tubes, as I could not control the thickness of the tube.

At this point I decided that I would take a step back and analyze again how other projects of a similar nature have been worked; One project that caught my attention was that of Joshua C. Hermanto, who explained his process little by little his submission. A very important detail that I began to notice is the combination of elements that are created from the main base of the creature and others that are only "superimposed" such as the eyes.

When superimposing it has the disadvantage that we will have a certain number of polygons that will not be seen in our texture but will occupy space in our UV maps, however we will be able to maintain a more controlled topology.

In our new attempt, several elements have been created from cubes and distributed according to need, others have been created from duplicate polygons of the main tank base.

Last two weeks of the project.

In the last two weeks of the project we got deeper and deeper into polishing all the stages.

Chibi Tank

First of all finishing the creation process in the tank, we concentrated on the elements distributed around the base, many of these elements were symmetrical in distribution so it only turned towards one and then it was reflected.

However, there were two elements that required special processes in their creation: the exhaust pipes and the ''chains''.

Exhaust pipes

This required a similar process found in JL Mussi's channel, where he explains how to create patterns in cylindrical elements. While this helped us immensely in creating the pattern, we had a more difficult time creating the UV maps, as we separated the inside of each circle. For this, we separate the main base of the object and cut the holes one by one, using the cylindrical projection tool.

Chains

During a feedback section, it was recommended to me to use the special duplicate tool combined with a curve for chain distribution, this worked perfectly. For this process, the base with two teeth was first created, UV mapping was applied to this base and teeth, in this way the duplicates would have the same attributes.

Sweep Mesh, I love you

Other of the tools that I used a lot in the creation of the tubes of my tank was the Sweep Mesh, which comes in the new update of Maya 2022, you can see the video of how it works in Maya Learning Channel, but in short it is that you select a curve, press the tool and you can create circular or square tubes, WONDERFUL.

Once all the pieces were created, the very long definitive UVmapping process began, that took me at least a full day. This is because the tank was distributed in 4 UV tails, trying to divide it from the tip to the base.

Transferring this model to substance with its separate UVtales required the following steps:

• We create a backup
• We select each UV tale separately and assign it a different texture, for example lambert, and it's better when we rename it to UDIM_1001, 1002, 1003 and 1004 respectively.
• Then we move the such UVs (with the move tool found in our UVtoolkit -> transform ->move, we will place all the such UVs in the first one.
• We export as FBX to Substance Painter.

In Substance Painter I had a LOT of fun playing around with layer attributes, especially the combination of normals with height and black and white textures. We were advised to work with Fill layers with black mask and adding paint, to have greater control in layer modifications. This worked very well for most of the process, however I also used a few coats of brush to create stencils and then added a black mask to give it a painted effect.

Most of the stencils used are part of the program and were modified according to the number of lines and length. I also wanted to put five stars symbolizing those that appear on the flag of my country Honduras (an extremely military country, you can still see many soldiers around the country) However, I set out to create one in Procreate and then import it, the one I think I made based on my puppy Oscar.

Here is an example of the U1V1 of the tank, where we have Base colour, Emissive, Normals, Height, Roughness and Metalness. However later on we also add AmbientOclussion.

To connect the textures it can be done semi-automatically with the Substance in Maya plugin, otherwise you have to activate it first in windows-> Preferences/settings -> Plug-in Manager and select the Substance ones.

Then we go to the Substance tab (in Maya) and apply Workflow to Maps. Ta-Da! You just need to put the right channels, It will create an aiStandardShader with the textures but may not connect it to the model, instead just select the model and assign an existing texture to it.

Although the textures looked fine in Substances Painter, I still had to do a couple of modifications in Maya, for example the display created by heights was creating a weird effect on the exhaust pipes, so it was disabled.

While the emissive layer was working fine in the end, it wasn't the effect I wanted so I opted to duplicate some parts and add a use as light attribute to them, to have more control over the lighting.

As last modifications, we created a series of lights that will help to illuminate the tank, more than anything directional without shadow effect.

In rendering I was fortunate to be able to render at university where I can use GPU capable equipment by adding an ''imager'' attribute called Lens Effect, which somewhat increases the brightness of the reflections. I really recommend taking a look at Arnold's documentation on this, plus what the system requirements are (not every computer can produce them).

Finally for project reasons, we needed to show Beauty and Wireframe in the final video, so I duplicated the tank and created a couple of render layers to make the process easier, overrithing render attributes and adding a sample in ambientOclussion as an extra.

Please enjoy final version!

Self-criticism

There are many aspects that I would like to fix the tank, listing the main ones:

• A better connection between tubes and the base.
• More details at the bottom.
• More quality in the textures, fix the problem with height maps.
• Specifically: experiment more with texture within canon.
• A couple of errors on the UV map where the textures got a bit distorted.

Abuelita is back!

Continuing the granny's process in Zbrush, we find ourselves with a brush experimentation stage. While many of the artists I follow and reference often use the same brushes for their work; I found multiple packs of brushes that helped me style Granny's skin and dress her up.

• Free ZBRUSH ALPHA PACK HAND SKIN By Renan Assuncao
• Free alpha cloth folds vol.2 By Max Derksen
• Realistic human skin alphas by Rafael Souza
• Cloth Seam Brushes + 4K Alphas by Muhammad Sohail Anwar 
  

We also encountered the difficulty of creating her shoes, while having a plan B: make the dress longer. But after multiple feedback sessions with the supervisors, the heels were improved to the desired quality point.

At the beginning of this project, it was desired to create the hair using Xgen in Maya, however after experimenting it was concluded that due to time, the hair could not be finished following this method. In any case, a brush pack created by Marthin Agusta Simny was used on a copy of the head, along with a sphere to create the tied-up hair.

Little by little our granny took shape, once she completed the desired details in Zbrush, perform a decimation process. Initially, a series of tips and video tutorials were followed from various sources, including classmates.

However, I soon realized that I really didn't understand the process and I was afraid of making a mistake and losing the details I had worked so hard on. So I did what everyone should do in this case: check out the Zbrush documentation.

In this way, the number of polygons in the model was considerably reduced, taking advantage of the fact that Decimation Master detects masks to protect elements such as the wrinkles on the elbows and face.

In any case, two exports were made, a high poly that would be used later in Marmoset for baking, and a smaller high poly for retopology.

This so my computer wouldn't die trying.

For retopology I worked in the following order:

• Face
• Hands
• Neck
• Shoes
• Rest of the body
• Dress

The hair was extremely difficult to retopoly, so a sphere was combined into the hair for the Live Surface, just being careful to add a larger amount to preserve some of the detail. 

Compared to the tank, granny's UV map was considerably easier, however for practical purposes the elements were separated with different shaders each; body, dress and later the jewelry.

Although it is known that the baking can be done in Substance Painter, it was decided to work with Marmoset for the edition of the automatic cage.

Great care was taken little by little editing the part of the face and arms, obtaining a normal and height mapping result, however there were small details to repair in photoshop.

The dress went through a similar process but separately, this because the dress was made by layers that do not touch, something that can be seen in the X-ray view.

In Substance Painter we find ourselves with another challenge: the UVtiles. First, the same procedure as the tank was followed, dividing the useful with different shaders, but this caused a problem with the fill layers in height maps. So the FBX was imported again, this time with all the elements with the same shader.

Although the height map in the body did not have so much problem, in the dress it caused a somewhat exaggerated displacement, even editing it at a lower level, so it was disconnected. Also the only elements that were not textured in Substance Painter was the jewelry, since they wanted to do something simpler made of gold and silver.

The lights were distributed around the body and it was desired to give an air of matriarchal superiority with the angle of the camera.

Final version!

Self-criticism

There are many aspects that I would like to improve with this model and that I will continue to experiment with beyond the assignment:

• The specular of the skin became too reflective, as if his skin was sweaty.
• Combine other attributes to create a better skin texture, like with Sheen.
• Although the model does have SubSurface, find a way to improve it with lights.
• Add even more jewelry, maybe even little details on it.
• Improve or make from scratch with Xgen the hair.
• Much smaller details on the skin, such as moles or BCG vaccine scars.
• Experiment more with height maps, learn to prevent errors.

And this is the end of my adventure within so many programs in relation to 3D modeling and sculpting, however it is not the end of my own learning, soon I will post more experimentation on my social media (like instagram!) :)

Happy start of 2022, year of the tiger!

Welcome to a new adventure.

Part 2 

Week 1

We start with a new class, in which we will gradually learn the secrets of modelling and sculpting.

If you want to read about my process in creating animations, you can see it here, on the other hand if you want to see something related to VFX, click here.

In the first place I decided to continue using ArtStation as my blog platform because I obtained good results in the visualization of my work, also I have made a couple of contacts here and it is always a good idea to keep it active :) 

It also has a good character's capacity (amount of words!), good support in the integration of videos from third sources and I do not worry about the contrast of the elements, since it maintains the graphic line of ArtStation. Finally, It have the option of skecthfab and I suspect it is something I will be using in the near future.

Now, let's talk about...

Background

When the Covid pandemic hit my small country Honduras in 2020, like many I was forced to work from home. While I was fortunate as my job was 99% remote, it was a moment of determination to continue my education.

At that time (March) it was already decided that I would study in the UK and that my master's degree would have to do with 3D, so together with different artists I began to practice with the first program I could get ...

Cinema 4D

Their platform is very intuitive, while Maya may seem a little saturated at first (due to the amount of functions it has) But what I hated about C4D was that to ''sculpt '' you needed to double the number of polygons and at that moment my poor laptop suffered.

As always, the topics that I like to try the most are animals and cultural things from Honduras, here are a couple of examples:

Later, the same friends put together a discord to do a weekly modeling event, forcing us to leave our comforts. A couple of my entries ...

Thesis ''La Sucia Animation''

For my thesis project (an animation of the myth of La Sucia) I made 3 character models, it was my first time in Maya and strongly influenced by the feedback of my counselors / teachers / discord professionals, to whom I am very grateful and They will be named at the end of the animation credits.

Some of my process:

And this was the end result, after a lot of experimentation.

Nomad Sculpt 

Finally (at least for this blog post) I downloaded the Nomad application for my iPad Pro and since the truth is like a simple version of zbrush, it has helped me to practice certain techniques while traveling by train.

Simple little things, heads of characters.

First steps

Before running you have to walk, it was there in May 2021 that I entered the world of Maya modelling for the first time and at that time it was a specific learning moment because my goal was to create 3 bipedal models with a caricature appearance.

However, this time it will be a generalized learning, with which I will be able to learn techniques that will be applied to various sectors. With this in mind, the first assignment of the class was to review the basics of modelling, here is a short summary:

• Differences between vertices, faces and edges.
• Understand how Maya works between hard-surface and soft-surface.
• Introduction to the difference between modelling for elements that will be animated or not.
• Hot KEYS!
• Subdivision and how that affects my computer's memory.
• How to maintain edges? Supporting!
• The four magic tools: extrude, insert edge loop, Multi-cut and Bevel.

Edge Flows

Polycount was one of the most useful pages I used during my modelling pipeline, specially fixing edge flows.

Personal recommendation: Print or draw this image in your notebook, you are going to re-visit it again and again and again. I did not create this from scratch, I based in some images that i have been saving, specially from Polycount.

Exercises in class

Here is a small compilation of the exercises we did in class, with a bit of information about how I did them and feedback.

First work in the middle of the object, creating a cylinder and selecting some faces to create the circles that will connect the U shape. Then for the U shape, make an extrude using a curve. However my biggest problem was that the tubes had different thicknesses.

I am also aware that my topology could be much better...

Week 2

Exercises at home

USB Drive

In this exercise, what I found the most challenging was the structure of the holes in the USB, since in the end I had to put several "supports" so that even in soft mode, it would retain its square shape.

If I had more time, I know I could fix the topology around it by reducing the faces.

Creating a Stick Grenade

For this object, the point that caused me the most difficulty was the connection between the cover at one end and the hook at the other end. The point that surprised me the most was the use of a helix, since it was used to create the metallic connection, personally I would have tried to create the spiral with curves and combine it with a cylinder, but this technique was much faster.

In my final result, I feel that I could have improved the curvature of many corners, especially the handle since I made it ''to the eye'', it would have been much better if I had ''traced'' it, maybe even using a curve and then converting it to a plane.

Extra: I made the texture of the wood with a ramp in aistandardshader, I liked the result haha.

Security Camera

This exercise was particularly difficult as it was in the reproduction of many elements with many curves. However, along the way, I learned to love the mirror tool, since sometimes the symmetry did not work completely. 

It could improve on many factors, especially between the connection of the camera to its mount (try to improve it with a lattite box) and some loops in general.

Extra: I tried playing around with the light emission from the glass, although technically the light should come from behind the glass.

UV Mapping

UV mapping is the process of dividing a 3d image on a 2D surface, in this way textures can be placed. During the process of my final project I had to learn quickly how UV maps worked, several supervisors assisted me exhaustively in the process.

However now I know that I could improve my UV with all the new that I am learning.

Here is a sample of what I did before class (click the image to see details):

Week 3

Class Exercises

During class we experienced a magnifying glass and a character of a man, the advantage of Maya is that it divides the sectors that we are "cutting" into colours. If we look closely we notice a texture of a grid, this helps us to know how much is the resolution in which the texture will project.

In the magnifying glass for example, it is composed of several separate elements, so the elements that are hidden do not need high resolution, so in our UV map we cut them and we can leave them small.

Another trick to use can be seen in this character, firstly, having all the elements together, we must be careful where to leave "the hidden cut" so that it does not alter our continuity of the texture. Also if we want to take advantage of the UV space to the maximum, we can '' flip '' elements that are the same as the texture will be the same, so leave both legs in the same position.

This trick would not work if, for example, one leg had different elements such as tattoos.

Week 4

Zbrush, I hate you, I love you

Zbrush and I have a story.

From the first course I took where I could not see all the elements of the program since my screen was small to hate the way the zoom works (which I change in the commands every time I open it, let me use the mouse roll Zbrush!)

But in these races the beast must be mastered, so I will be putting extra effort in learning how to use it, also I seriously want to make Honduran outfits in this program. (Spoiler for my final project!)

Blocking Batman

The first exercise done in zbrush that I did was to create the blocking for this batman, however in my first attempt I had a lot of difficulties with:

• Placing the images.
• Center the elements.
• Switch between object and environment symmetry.
• Camera view.
• Colors to make it look pretty.
• uuuuhg

I know that part of the problem is that I keep thinking about how Maya works, in Maya you can '' snap '' objects to a grid, have different views at the same time and work with local or '' world '' controllers with a simple change of clicks.

In the last class we had a fantastic guest, Carlo! who with a lot of patience helped me answering many questions (especially symmetry)

With all this and many YouTube tutorials on how to block, I decided that the first Batman was a lost cause and start over.

Although the second attempt had a considerably better result, I have a lot to improve; At first glance I can tell that the shoes could look better, put more elements on the belt, accentuate muscles and I always had a little problem with the reference images, because we can see that the Batman from the side has a better cranial shape than the one from the front.

Big Shark

In this very long exercise we have applied most of the things that we have seen in Zbrush, if I had to summarize the process it would be something like:

Elements (like a sphere) -> Zremesher-> Blocking -> Add Appends and repeat until you block all character.

It is recommended to do the blocking with elements that have very few polygons, to better understand how the shapes, your silhouette, the reading of your character work and so that your computer / laptop does not die :)

Once with the blocking done, we introduce our dear friend Dynamesh, to add softer and more ''moldable'' surfaces, in this we can work elements individually and then combine the groups little by little until we have something like this:

In Process...

Week 5

Retopology

Surprisingly, retopology is one of my favorite aspects of the process, as my computer doesn't suffer as much.

It is (literal) to recreate the topology in a simpler way and with Quaddraws.

Again an example of my work in the thesis:

(add image)

And now with the exercises in class, among the examples I chose that of an older man to try to work with wrinkles. The model was not symmetrical so that caused problems for me, besides I forgot one of the most important retopology tips: Start with the eye and mouth cycles!

I am mentalized in "the topology must produce cycles". This means that when I select a polygon a cycle is activated. This is especially important for animation, as these loops will help us create rigs for facial expressions. Example:

However with the final result we notice that we lose a lot of details, but do not worry! DO NOT PANIC! We will use another program to combine both models and get the best of both worlds.

Week 6

Characters Concept exercises

Exercise 1

Mastering the technique is very important, it allows us to reproduce what already exists, but working with concepts allows us to create original elements or characters.

In this enclass exercise we were given the following world in which we will incorporate our character:

World Context: In this world, science has no boundaries, but humanity’s numbers have diminished greatly after a series of catastrophic events. To reintroduce genetic diversity, human embryos are commonly spliced with animals, resulting in hybrid races.

In this case we create a character with Latin descent, small stature, with androgenic characteristics, bird DNA (specifically Tucan), with a slim to athletic body. Mohair style haircut, with only one eye, working on organized crime, tattoos and Cyber-punk style clothes. Here you can see the collected references:

The reference task reminds us that in each photograph there may be only one detail that we like, but that detail can make a difference for the character. During this exercise I focused on finding a way to combine the green and yellow colors in the hair, so I have images that have nothing to do with mohair, but more like the degradation of the hair, if the color would only be in The tips are divided, if it is short as it will look, if it is long, smooth or wavy. These exercises will be used for the creation of our characters.

Exercise 2

For the following exercise I chose the character of Jimmy Levinsky, to answer at least 25 questions from this character.

What is your occupation?
I'm a super hero, a bit like a mad scientist, sometimes in trouble with the law because they don't understand my genius and they don't know that to create you have to destroy a little.

What words and / or phrases do you use very frequently?
Don't trust me, trust science.

What do you have in your pockets?
Spare nuts, a marker that never seems to wear out, and a tissue to wipe the oil off my hands.

Do you have any quirks, strange mannerisms, annoying habits, or other defining characteristics?
I am extremely organized in my own way, this means that even though my lab looks disorganized, don't touch anything because I know exactly where everything is.

Do you have any allergies, diseases, or other physical weaknesses?
I am not physically strong, especially in my legs.

Did you enjoy school?
At first because of the access to books, but then I got bored, the teachers couldn't keep up.

As a child, were you popular? Who were your friends, and what were they like?
I thought I had many friends, always laughing with me, but later I described that they laughed at me.

When and with whom was your first kiss?
It was after saving a little leg from an explosion that she does not know that I caused, unfortunately that was the last time I saw her.

As a child, what were your favourite activities?
Silent reading and laboratory classes.

Who has had the most influence on you?
My great-aunt didn't always understand my inventions, but she always supported me.

Do you have a criminal record of any kind?
A couple of accidents here and there, insurers don't like me.

Are you basically optimistic or pessimistic?
I like to consider myself an optimist.

What is your biggest fear?
A superhero should not have any fear, but I have to admit that I am not the best friend of the spiders.

How close are you to your family?
Well I always send letters at Christmas but only one niece answers them, she seems to have a little fascination for science at her young age.

Do you tend to take on leadership roles in social situations?
Absolutely.

What makes you laugh?
That there are still people who believe the earth is flat.

Are you spontaneous or do you always need to have a plan?
Plans are built in the process, I like to be more spontaneous.

Do you smoke, drink, or use drugs? If so, why? Do you want to quit?
Those things weaken the brain.

What is your greatest strength as a person?
My intellect, I always trust my brain.

Do you like yourself?
Yes of course! Although I wouldn't mind liking more people.

Where do you see in 5 years?
Opening my own academy for brilliant minds.

What three words best describe your personality?
Brilliant, genius and charismatic.

What three words would others probably use to describe you?
''Papanatas'', clueless and destructive.

What are your hobbies?
When I have an idea in my head, I usually lock myself in my own mind.

Do you usually argue with people or avoid conflicts?
It's not that I like conflict, but it's that sometimes I can't let an ignorant comment pass easily.

This exercise allowed me to get into the personality and life of the character, make it more real and able to empathize with him.

Week 7

Ai Standard Shader

In this class we delve into the Arnold Shader, remembering what we had already seen in Perfecting the look. Among the various types, in the following image (from left to right and front to back) we see the following variations:

• Base
• Metal
• Specular
• Thin Film
• Transmission
• Subsurface
• Coat
• Emission
• Sheen (Dress)
  

Remembering these functions will be extremely necessary when we start texturing, especially if we want to give it a more realistic look. There is one of the extra exercises that I will have to review more than once, that of aiComposite Shader, aiMix Shader and aiTwoSided Shader; Because one of the elements for my final project will have several oxidized metals.

Let's continue in Part 2

Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 4

Week 10: Calendar and planning

During this week we were reviewing what is necessary for our final project, today I am going to go a little more in detail about my process.

First of all, all my processes are divided into quadrants: (click on the image to make it bigger)

The first stage in all the animations is the longest, it is the creation of all the key poses, with some breakdowns, the checklists that I am using are those mentioned in the previous blogs, the animation checklist, Lip Sync and all the feedback that I have. received in different exercises.

The first stage in all the animations is the longest, it is the creation of all the key poses, with some breakdowns, the checklists that I am using are those mentioned in the previous blogs, the animation checklist, Lip Sync and all the feedback that I have. received in different exercises.

Once this process is done, it will be a matter of adding all the drag and overlapping of the secondary elements (ears, clothes, hair, tails, etc.)

And finally after finishing the necessary of the assignment, I can concentrate on adding extras.

But ... what is necessary in these assignments?

• Walk cycle: No less than 6 seconds, with personality.
• Character Performance: No less than 8 seconds, based on storyboard and lin sync.
• Attack Combo: Not less than 5 seconds, must have at least 3 hits (extra if it has narrative)

Why do I work this way?

This brings me back to my times when I work in an advertising agency, all projects are clients with deadlines, everyone wants their project to come out first, EVERYONE WANTS TO LOOK THE BEST.

With this I learned to prioritize, WHAT does my client want? WHAT will my added value be? What will my cushioning mattress be if a mishap happens?

There are 3 animation projects and one CGI (I explain this in my other blog, starting in part 2).

I have the advantage of having my own computer, but also using a virtual access to university computers, so I am animating on a computer while rendering CGI tests on the university computer.

Why do I plan for the worst?

In my beautiful country, in my hometown Tegucigalpa, we have the disadvantage that we never know if the electricity is going to fail. So I used to having backups, emergency batteries and trying to collect all my documents in a memory drive, instead of the cloud (because you don't know if the internet is going to fail as well).

So, call it experience.

PROJECT WEEK 1: Key Poses and Motion Trial

Walk cycle

This first week I focused on the creation of Key Poses, for my walk cycle I tried to create a direction with the head from top camera and it worked in a certain way, but after the feedback I was told how to fix the poses since the exaggeration was it was getting out of hand.

A very important point was to assign the weight to one leg at a time, in the sense of not losing balance in the steps (or at least not until the end).

Among the best points achieved were various poses that define the character, the expression and how I am trying to show that the character is drunk.

Another point to consider is who are doing the hands, add appeal.

Attack Combo

In the same way, I worked on the key poses of the first two kicks, I must be especially careful with clothes and using the tail in the line of action.

For this animation, I am recommended to work it in the way that you can see the pose well in different cameras, since it would be a good example of character animation for video games (yay!)

First Kick

Second Kick

After having worked on these two kicks, we had a session with another of our instructors, Mr. Constantino; this was his feedback:

• More fingers movement.
• More frames in the beginning
• Consider your poly-vectors
• Bring your chest and head
• Fix your anklers
• Add an small step in the beginning.
• Avoid over extention.
• HIPS!!!!

Performance

Elaboration of key poses BUT also the environment and the cameras, for this case I will be breaking the model favoring the camera.

The lines that you see in the camera are guide lines for the rule of thirds (the basics of the basics in camera position haha)

The poses for Douglas were simple at first, but with the help of my teacher we were able to achieve a better emotion.

Also, very important to mention: my teacher recommended to add a pose where Douglas is looking around to emphasize that he is trying to sneakily eat empanadas.

Feedback for GoodBoy:

• Add look around before getting on the table.
• Improve poses
• Yes, deformation is ok, but be careful with your transitions.
• Pupils (0u0)!!

PROJECT WEEK 2: Key Poses and cleaning breakdowns

This week is to determine my most important keyframes and start adding breakdowns, this week I was focused on verifying that all transitions were functional (but not yet stylized)

Functional but not stylish? What do you mean?

I mean that since I'm constantly moving the characters, I have to be careful that the rotations and translations are working correctly.

The best example is with my Attack Combo, in this aerial view I have highlighted where the foot is positioned and in which direction it is rotating, if we see in my graph editor my rotations AND they are in constant elevation, since we are rotating.

Why is it important to understand this? Technically speaking, the position of my foot in 0 is the same as in 360, with the difference that 360 already has a turn. If in my graph editor I changed that rotation from 360 to 0 it would look the same in my pose, BUT when seeing the animation we would appreciate that the ankle makes a complete turn (breaking) since the number before 360 was probably 200 and the next number is greater than 360.

Oh! Math! It is these small details that help me understand how my animation is working and verify that it follows a logical sequence.

Now with this cleared up, let's see how I have worked with my animations independently.

Walk cycle

This is the first animation that I'm sure has a definite start and end, it starts with his head directing the movement and ends up passed out on the ground; with this resolved, it is a matter of working the medium (hahaha a piece of cake? Lol no)

This was the result of the week...

Feedback

• Start fixing spacing and timing, delaying some poses and speeding up others.
• Use more of the chest and hips, to gradually eliminate that "floating" animation.
• Use the control of the ankle instead of the entire foot for this movement:

• Try not to overextend the leg muscles, this can be repaired by editing the Stretchy attribute.

• Focus on the hips, chest and legs; hands later.

Attack Combo

In this update, he added the poses for the third stop and the final pose ... for now, as let's remember that I want to add an ending with the bag falling on his head.

For this feedback, they mentioned several aspects similar to the walk cycle, fixing the ankles, spacing and timing. However, one aspect to highlight was to add secondary movements in the chest and legs during the "impacts", adding more force in the contact.

I take this opportunity to say that the reason why I am not working with the bags at the same time as the character is because my reference (Don Chibi!) Was performing the movements without impact, this with the purpose of having the cleanest silhouette. It is not the only way to work a combat animation, but for the purpose I want to achieve, it has worked in my favor.

Performance

Finally we have our friend Douglas, applying the various poses suggested by my teacher have helped to give more life and drama to our character.

Among several things, it was to give more emphasis to the eyes and the movement of the ears as an indicator of anticipation of direction, thoughts and emotions, in addition to exaggerating more some poses.

Regarding the feedback, I have received very good opinions about the direction this animation is taking, especially showing the personality.

This does not mean that it does not have points to improve, on the contrary many points are the same as the Walk Cycle and Attack Combo, this I can take as proof that I have patterns or habits that are slowing me down (for example, I did not experiment enough with my rigs before starting the animation).

If we see what I have worked on this week, I hope I can say that my goal of understanding the story without dialogue has been achieved.

This means that now I have to get into lip sync, let's stop for a moment and see what else I have to do in week 3: 

Walk cycle, Attack Combo and ... oh

For those who have not been aware, I have also been working on a CGI project (click to see the whole process, or only in part 2 to see specifically project) for my Perfecting the Look class which is delivered the April 22 (Earth Day!) So considering that my computer will be rendering the entire weekend of week 2 and I will be focused on finishing that project, I have to consider a delay for the 3 animation projects (which are delivered on May 3).

This is why I've been strongly considering changing the ending where Douglas steals an empanada and just cutting it off when he's caught. We have to prioritize scenes! And the priority at Douglas right now is adding audio.

Unexpected problems

After receiving my feedback, I tried to convert my animations to stepped mode (I had left them in spline for feedback) and every time I did it in my walk cycle the program would freeze.

I tried creating copies, removing animation layers, changing the animation display type from Parallel to DG and it still kept freezing to the point that you had to close it with Task Manager.

Fortunately our teacher was able to give me a hand by reviewing the file in different versions of Maya (2019, 2020, 2021) and in one he found that the problem is that my animation has "ghosts", do not ask me how to activate them, but it showed me how to remove them and that fixed the problem.

As you can see in the image, it is a matter of being in your animation mode, go to visualize and select Unghost all.

In addition, the creation of animation layers has slowed down the way I work, so to optimize myself I have been creating sets of parts that I need to edit independently, I did it following the class tutorial :)

PROJECT WEEK 3: Mouth Shapes, overlapping and drag

Part of last weekend and this week was almost exclusively dedicated to finishing the CGI project (click to see the final result) so I had to dedicate more time to the animation that I needed the most: Performance, since being the animation that it will have more score and for this week it still had not started with voice synchronization.

Let's start there

Performance

What will our friend Douglas tell the world? many will ask. First I want to start by saying that in audio matters if I averaged from 1 to 10, it would give me a 3 because since it is difficult for me to hear the errors, so I seriously consider using some movie audio.

In class we shared the following pages where you can download free audios: Movieswavs, movie-sounds, SoundBoard and FreeSound.

However, the talk we had with Ed Hooks + his book inspired me a lot to make a funny audio with a dog, so here we are.

I'm a good boy,

I must resist... but

Maybe just a bite

No no no no!

She would get MAAAAD!

I can... always blame the cat... :)

To be honest, I was very nervous with the remaining time of my animation and the creation of mouth shapes (even now I do not feel 100% with them) even following the advice from class and the festival (how to play with visemes, phonemes, block our jaw movement on 2's, etc).

But at that moment I felt a wind coming through my window, I turned to the corner of my room and said "Y esta rosa?" And with joy I saw this video of How to animate lipsync in a hurry by Alexander Williams

(Reference to a program in Mexico called La Rosa de Guadalupe, for those who do not understand I want to say that by pure luck this video came out in notifications hahaha)

With much more confidence and a bottle of molten dew, I dedicated myself to creating my mouth shapes, here is a sample of how they were combined with the poses.

With this ready, I dedicated myself to clean the arcs that are created with Dougla's ears, legs and nose; always taking into account appeal poses.

This week I started to clean the arches that are created with the ears, legs and especially nose of Douglas; always taking into account appeal poses. Also try to reduce this '' slip '' effect that he on the legs.

Feedback for the 3 animations

Already mentioned, because of the pressure with CGI work I had to run the work times in the animations, so I will talk about the long list of changes that I received on the weekend in part 4.

Part 1 , Part 3 , Part 4

StoryBoards

In class, we did a short exercise creating the storyboard / Thumbnails for the first page of the Monsters Inc. script.

Here is my result...

Feedback:

In general I got good opinions, only in page 3, middle box 2nd line, ''It's the only time we see the character from behind, and the camera angle crosses the line'' and gave me a good link about the term and how to prevent it. Something that I will definitely consider in the future.

Extra:

On Valentine's Day Don Chibi gave me the book '' Steven Universe: Art & Origins '' by Chris McDonnell, Rebecca Sugar & Genndy Tartakovsky. BEAUTIFUL and super recommended, not only for its detailed process in creating the show, but if you are like me and you LOVE the show is mega rewarding to read. You can have a quick look in this video.

AND NOW...

I’m going to introduce you to the assets I’ll use in my final project, for now these are ideas that I have been working on:

DRUNK WALKING CYCLE

During a holiday with Don Chibi in 2019, we went to one of my Favourite places in Honduras, Amapala, more specific we visited “La Isla del Tigre“ an island with a conical basaltic stratovolcano. In those magnificent beaches we loved to see my inspiration for this project: a drunk man walking in the beach, somehow drinking sea water from a beer bottle.

Ah! The memories!

So for this drunk walking cycle I’ll use Zhu Baijie, a maya rig by TruongCgArtist, concept art by Tuan Nguyen  and Finalizing Model & Texture by Leo Nguyen.

You can have a look of their preview video here.

I have to say, so far this was the most difficult model to find, since I wanted a rig with tummy, but without being a character with a sphere instead of a maleable stomach.

3 HIT COMBAT

For this part of the project we were given the option to choose between create a 3 hit combat or a character lifting an object, excited I decided to go with combat and record Don Chibi doing Kung Fu moves over and over and over.

For this rig, I found in a different website ANOTHER rig from TruongCgArtist, called Wukong, concept by Tuan Nguyen  and Textures by Leo Nguye.

Aaaand here’s their preview video!

For the third part of the project I still haven’t choose my rigs, but for now I’ll let you with...

LIST OF WEBSITES FOR 3D ASSETS.

Something that can be helpful for more than one person.

• CGtrader
• Open3Dmodel
• TurboSquid
• Sketchfab
• Renderhub
• HighEnd3d
• CreateCG
• Gumroad
• Textures (mostly textures, but also some 3d Objects)
• 3Dtextures.me (more realistic textures)
• GlobePlants (only high quality plants models, nothing free though!)
• and of course, here in Art Station!

If I find any other website I’ll add it to the list!

Week 7: How to create a performance

During this week I have been walking, eating and breathing principles of the animation, I have gone to the park and I begin to fill my sketchbook with walking key poses (when I improve them I will post them here)

Until then I would like to incorporate the annotations I made during the lecture with ... d r u m s ... ED HOOKS!

ED HOOKS IN THE HOUSE

Ed is a MASTER, actor recognized for his techniques, He has created a guide for actors AND animators, in this case highlighting his book '' Acting for Animators'' which I am eager to get my hands on :) 

Thanks for the gift, bro!

These were quick notes, so if I misunderstand something bear with me jajaja

In animation, your character is an ACTOR, not a puppet. If I touch your cheek you are going to have a reaction.

Acting is BEHAVING BELIEVABLY in pretend circunstances for a Theatrical Purpose.

A lot of people would say your character needs to see... real, but nobody cares about regular reality, that's boring. Humans are the only ones who can pretend, animals can't. However this ability only begins to manifest on children between 4-5 years old, not younger.

We have to study humans like we are a martian, Why would humans like to walk into a room with a big screen and sit watching images for two hours? Why do some decorate their bodies with pictures? Why do they change their voices when they speak to animals? Oh! the mysteries!

EMOTION leads to ACTION-- You should be able to freeze your character and know: action, obstacle and objective.

In reality we think CONFLICT as something bad, but in acting that can change, you can have a conflict about choosing an ice cream flavour.

Your animation have to be theatrical valid, your audience don't care if your character is natural, they care about the story. BELIEVE in your story, villians dont think they're villians.

In stage, the audience looks at the person talking.

In movies, they look at the person listening.

Some studios made the mistake of record first the text (audio) this looks like audio is more important than animation. THIS is why acting has almost nothing to do with WORDS.

Also It's good to think about what is your character thinking while they're speaking, for example is we have a romantic dinner and one of the persons says ''I love you''  to the other, could be a very confident one, a shy one, if it's the first time or the 100 time they say it, words are the same but body languages tells different stories.

ANIMATE the THOUGHT! 

Coming back to our romantic dinner, It's the first time saying I love you, how the other person is going to react? We are waiting for a BLINK.

Blinks are magical, they help to cut scenes and open to emotion. FUN FACT: We humans need 3 blinks per minute just to keep our eyes wet, all the other blinks are emotionals, full with thoughts. ANY 5 years old are experts on this.

Finally, Ed gave us the option to email him if we had any more questions. This was mine...

What do you think about foreign animation studios/work? More specific with Latinoamérica.

I am always curious how they see us in Latin America, in a few words He agreed with me that the industry in many countries is non-existent (like Honduras where we mainly animate for marketing). The studios that are being developed are mostly in Mexico and Brazil. Although, now with the pandemic the doors of working as an independent artist are opening more and more, it does not matter so much if you are in the same city or if you are in India, Thailand or who knows, Honduras. Now it depends more on your portfolio and your ability to make yourself known in the community.

Animation Community

This was another topic touched on in class these days, how to interact with the community of animators, there are different platforms (like auqi in ArtStation) where giving and receiving advice is easier and more, lately I like to see what people are doing on the AGORA Discord, Or review the processes of different artists on Twitch; but what I've really been paying a lot more attention to is the animation analytics that Frame by Frame Animation shares. (I told you before, breathing animation jaja).

Week 8: Conversations that are fun to watch! (lyp sinc)

This week we not only learned about lip syncing in class, it was also a topic covered at The VFX Festival but we'll get to it.

Apparently, there are 38 different phonemes in the English language, these phonemes have associated mouth shapes –a combination of different facial features working together to produce those sounds –jaw, lips, teeth, tongue, etc. 

Although my main problem is that I keep learning about how sounds are produced in English, for example I feel that L is easier to pronounce in English than in Spanish, but I have a problem with TT since in Spanish T has a stronger sound. (So in these cases, I'm seeing how other people pronounce it better LOL)

One of the things to remember is that we don't have to animate EVERY syllable, but work on dividing the sounds with the shape of the mouth.

We also have to think about how important the phrase is, what part is necessary to add certain expressions, for example: if someone is speaking in diminutive (such as talking to a baby or a pet) our mouth will have a different shape than if we speak in a normal way.

One of my favorite examples is the way Hana in Tokyo Godfathers, where She talks with a lot of energy and expression on her face.

Tokyo Godfather's example 

If we pay too much attention to each letter, our animation will be exaggerated, so we have to be careful in which breakdowns are functional; also VISEMES! According to wikipedia, A viseme is any of several speech sounds that look the same.  In class a comparison was made of how to pronounce mama and pebble, almost the same movement of the mouth.

With this in mind we usually only have 4 mouth positions, open, closed, wide and narrow. With the exception of certain sounds like F and V.

In class they gave us this table where it is explained in a better way how the sound distribution would be, I will leave them in high quality in case it works for someone else :) I printed it.

If the dialogue is too fast to fit two frames into the sync, steal a previous frame for the 2 frame count.An exception to this: Consonant, Vowel,  Consonant, Vowel,  Consonant, Vowel...

Tips for Lyp Sinc (in class)

• Mouth is not independent from face, TEN muscles are needed to smile! 
• Breakdown the audio and listen over and over and over!!!
• Peaks are likely your accents.
• Consider the scene setup, create CONTEXT and SUBTEXT
• Do not add too many poses.
• Body language change eveything, but be careful that is not eclipsing our facial acting.
• Time our facial expression BEFORE a major change in body position.
• Shapes 1 or 2 frames ahead of sounds can often work well, but late shapes NEVER work.
• When animating vowels, fast-in to the extreme shape, then soften it to a position that diminishes the sound.
• Make sure the rigs polys are not smooth preview mode!

Tips for Lyp Sinc by Chris Welsby #VFXfestival

During the week I had the pleasure of attending the conferences of the VFX Festival 2021, one of my favorites (and what a good time to see it) was that of Chris Welsby, Senior Animator at MPC, where he was explaining the process in the creation of this commercial focusing on lyp-sync.

Cat Litter from ARM & HAMMER™ TV Commercial

In the first place, Sync is the most difficult and crucial element of lyp-sinc animation, we should see the mouth shape before hearing the sound. Key shapes such as M/P/B/E and O should hold for at least 2 frames or they won't be readable. The software you choose to view your animation can have a BIG IMPACT on sync playback, be carefuuuuul!

Then we have Readability, It's crucial that the lip-sinc is clear and readable, be careful not to include too many phonemes as the animation could start to feel very choppy and hard to read. As mentioned earlier try to hold key sounds for as long as possible.

Think about tour camera angle and distance from the camera, REFERENCE!

The faster the dialogue the trickier this becomes.

Finally we have Emotion/Reference; emotion can have a big impact on the mouth shapes needed. VERY important to get the base sync and readability working firts. Once we have our sync, we can add emotion in the voice, our next stage is ti make it feel that the voice is really coming from your character.

-----> EYES and BROWS are importan at this stage as they will really help emphasis the emotion in the voice. <-------

★·.·´¯`·.·★ What to do when your audio does not work...? ★·.·´¯`·.·★ 

I had this problem where my audio did not work, in the end my teacher gave me the solution but just in case someone else is having the same problem, this is easy steps to check:

1. Your audio have to be .wav (not mp3 or something else, if not you can convert it with this free program Audacity)
2. Right click in yout timeline where your audio appers and check that you Playback Speed is set to Real-time.
3. Go to your preferences -> Settings -> Animation -> Evaluation mode and be sure is set to Parallel (my was in DG).

Week 9: Walk cycle and more lyp syn

During this week I was trying to experiment a little more with Lip Sync, after watching several tutorials and a couple more lectures I got ready to do the next class exercise.

What I tried to do was try to create a motion trial by focusing on the nose. Taking special care with overlapping and drag (hair and earring) I must say that I had special difficulty trying to achieve the shape of the mouth and even now I have been willing to practice a little more in creating mouth shapes.

This was the result:

These are some key points in the feedback given by my teacher:

• Play more in Anticipation
• Careful with Breakdowns
• When you do an action, '' What is leading the action? ''
• Mouth should be wider

Other tips he has given in class is to review:

• Book '' Anatomy of Facial Expression ''
• Website Face the FACS
• Google references for Facial Action Coding System.

I was also working a bit on practice and creating a walk cycle for my project, in this case I was reading over and over and over and over again "the walking section" From Animators Survival Kit, creating mini cycles and motion trials. 

However, all these details are explained in this video, including my sketches for the three projects. (Subs in english and spanish)

See you in Part 3

You can check my progress with Perfecting the Look here.

Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4

 Narrating my path in Media Specialist Practice.

Before going into the details of the class, I will comment a little on aspects that I learned that helped me to incorporate a little into the program before week 1.

About a month before starting the module, I received an email from the course leader advising the students to take a look at Maya and a reading list about animation principles.

I have to mention, that having a little bit of experience with Cinema 4D, the transition from this platform to Maya was initially a sudden shift, the Maya interface is intimidating at first glance, and the editing systems have different workflows.

Among the various tutorials that I watched to familiarize myself with the platform, this introduction by FlippedNormals was the one that I liked the most as it explained the interface and the shortcuts, I took the liberty of writing down each of the points explained and practiced them little by little in the program.

On the reading side, The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams continues to be one of the best guides within the principles of animation.

Week 1: Introduction and lots of practice.

In short, the case project will consist of very specific animations; a human walking cycle, an animal animation and a range of expressions.

Since the topics are broad, I will list a couple of ideas that I have come up with to make them fun.

• For the walk, a fat drunk walking with great difficulty, reminding me of a time when I went on vacation to the beach and there was a man drinking sea water instead of his beer.
• For animals, I would like to experiment with a reptile as I feel like they crawl uniquely, especially a crocodile or a lizard.
• Finally for expressions, I would like to make an awkward expression, as if someone wants to sneeze but can hardly achieve it. I would still like to make flirty expressions.

Closing the week I was practicing with some of the exercises from the course, especially one of a ball hitting a wall, the only thing that frustrated me a bit was that I could not install a plugin called TweenMachine that helps create breakdowns in Maya, so I did them manually.

Week 2: Practice, practice, and more practice.

Just as it is written in the title, this week I focused on practicing and experimenting with Maya. I have learned a lot about how the program works and also how MUCH it differs from Cinema 4D.
Also, I managed to focus a bit more on creating playbasts, especially basic lights, so the animation example (no need to render) looks decent enough.

I will leave a gif here with a compilation of the exercises that I worked during the week, making it clear that I did not create the rigs or the models, I just played with the animations, especially experimenting with the timing.

On the other hand, I would like to record the animators who I usually follow for their work, a lot and with whom I usually test tutorials regarding the principles of animation.

Alex Grigg

Gastón Pacheco  

One of my favourite from Latinoamerica, check his animation in 00.48. Either way the whole compilation in this ad is amazing.

(Also his new project Gorrionetas)

Kevin Gemin

Now, THIS LEGEND! This artist introduced me principles of animation waaaay before I knew those were principles, his work is incredible and I have been following his tutorials for years, here some examples. He have a lot in his Patreon.

I have to say that I have sinned a bit in the sense that most of the animators of which I refer are 2D, in 3D animation I usually follow studios or projects, of which my favorites:

• Pretty much anything made by Studio Laika.
• Pingu, non-dialogue projects like this are a great reference for stage plays.
• PuiPui Molcar's project, scenography, emotions without dialogue.
• Yakuza, Like a dragon, has been a title that has impressed me a lot in the sense of 3D animated designs, eccentric and with an air of fantasy without leaving aside the absurd.

Finally during this week I was working a little on the advancement of my final project, specifically in the segment of making a combat animation. For this I asked Don Chibi (my partner) to perform some Kung Fu movements in the park, then I filtered the videos and made some syn sketches, the movement contains 3 kicks, however I would like to replace the second with a high kick. What I have in mind that will be the object to hit will be pieces of wood falling from the sky, a small example of what I have in mind:

Week 3: POSE!

Oh my! this brings me memories of my illustration classes. When I do my personal work that includes posing I always take in consideration shadows, mirror, exageration and A LOT of reference.

During the class we good some good exercises with posing ''Jackie'', starting with a T-Pose.

In my first pose I wanted to experiment with a happy girl, full with love and dreams, almost floating in the air.

A little explanation from my notes, the yellow lines are my arcs/ lines of action, this also helps to emphasize mood, usually when you are happy, head goes UP! (unless is a shy happiness), then we have my blue lines where C means complicated and S stands for Simple, this means that one part of your silhouette is going to follow a simple line than the other. Finally something is not always necessary but it helps, trying to get the chin or cheek out in the silhouette, indicating where is going to be the face direction.

In this case my reference is a body mirror in my room, always something handy to work with. Hands and face always tell most of the story, smiling with the eyes and holding tied with hands usually means passion for something.

Next example, Jackie is tired of hearing nonsense, getting annoyed. Son in this pose I'm closing her body, feet feels more heavy and hands are ''defeated''. Extra touch: leave the space between arm and tummy, it looks less busy. Althought I liked the pose I'm not completely happy with how looks the conection between the extended leg and hip.

Alright! This one! Definitely thinking of poses for my final project, taking a reference from a professional fighter, but exaggerating a couple of details.

The first was the extended leg, his foot is at an angle of 180 but that would not look good on my silhouette, so I left it at an angle of 90. Then I had to take the consideration that if I raised the leg more it could be seen rare in the model, like the bent leg, that although it seems that his ankle is touching the rest of the leg, I think it is only an effect of the loose clothing.

A detail that was a bit indecisive was the closed fist inside the silhouette of the arm, since if I took my hand out of the silhouette it reminded me of this emoticon ᕦ (ツ) ᕤ, in the end I feel that just looking at the knuckles get the idea.

  

Finally (for now) I was playing a lot with a panicky expression, I was looking for images of horror houses with snapshots, like this one, and also making expressions in the mirror.

I feel like a nice touch was playing with her hair, like the phrase "It makes my hair stand on end'' or in spanish ''Me pone los pelos de punta''.

Another of the exercises was to do a pose for 15-20 minutes and then go back to improve it, first was evil laugh, then choke and finally sadness.

Very good news this week: I received some feedback in my practice animation and posing, here the major points I have to improve:

Animation Feedback:

• Improve motion trial, with my Pendulum my Motion trial was a little too straight, needs more arcs in movement.
• I need to clean my keyframes, sometimes I add too many in innecessary places.
• Improve Overlapping
• Don't be afraid of Rotation!
• Be careful with timing with legs (my little egg jumping) also I broke their knees a little too much (sorry eggman).

Posing Feedback:

• Caaaaareful with broking bone and spine.
• Eye brows need to follow a connection, since they are connected with a muscle.
• Careful with editing the major position control (the one the determinates our charecter position in the area) 'cause when you animate, change it back mess up with all your pose.

In short: I tend to exaggerate too much and forget about bones, putting a post it in my wall to remind me!

Week 4: Breakdowns and timing

During this workshops we needed to improve our habilities to create interesting breakdowns and correct timing, with some extra exercises applying an Animator’s Checklist. Here’s my quick guide:

Timing: In this exercises we were given several documents with pre-made animations, but all with a timing of 1 frame, so we needed to re-organizate this animations in a way in makes sense, following some examples. SO HERE! I present to you a compilation of my results, in the last one I made two versions, since i wanted one doing just fine with pushups and another struggling a little...

Breakdowns: with the following ones, we were given 2 poses and needed to create a transition between the two, with different moods and trying to create funtional breakdowns.

Oh boy, I did took some extra time with this ones, I feel I have some problems with breakdowns so I was trying to doing some ''pose to pose'' and cheking the examples in the workshop, I did create several ones but this 3 were my favourite.

Maya did also crash, but with a PLENTY experience in photoshop and Illustrator crashing, I was always doing my CTRL+S and autosaves every 10 minutes.

For this one I'm not completely satisfied, but I like it the result of  ''Oh what, you need me? fine here I go'' I tried applying the Animator's checklist, but seeing it again I feel the timing a little too fast.

Finally I took a little of time to check some reference videos of drunk people walking and play with this in Syncsketch and here were my results my conclusions of movement:

• ARCS everywhere, even in their walking path.
• They try to move their body in one direction, but It follows their head, so If they head goes in the opposite direction, all the body needs to move there.
• Arms have their own control, only really moves drastically when they need to body to moves in a completely different direction.
• Between my different references, I really like the most of the body moving like leaving their head behind.

Also, all my references: Drunk on a hill , Drunk 2 , and this drunk boy in min 4.50.

Week 5 and 6: Catching up!

During these weeks I have been practicing and trying to follow the feedback from the previous exercises, fortunately during week 5 they gave us a little more time to '' catch up '' with the workshops.

In addition to analyzing animations, detecting that they have the 12 principles of animation, I personally advance with breakdowns and one-leaf loop exercises (which can be applied to queues, something to take into account for my project, you will soon see why .. .)

Also, during one of the previous weeks we briefly explored storyboarding. Honestly when I was in an advertising agency it was one of the steps I least like to do, but these days I have reviewed the storyboards of my favorite series.

 See you in part 2.