Year 1 – Virtual Spaces – Final Project

(Final videos and critical appraisal at the end of this tread)

In this project we had to create a character design for an imaginary game based on a celebration from our respective culture. In my brainstorming phase, I had three options for Romanian celebrations: Capra dance, easter, or ghiocei flowers. Using padlet helped me visualize and storyboard on different ideas. It helped me become more organized and ask questions such as: “How can I make a character from this holiday” and “How can I make my character have an interesting background story?”

After deciding that I wanted to go forward with the goat idea, ‘Capra’ dance, I started doing some rough draft sketches of how I wanted the character to look like. A young teenager boy who has a bit of a belly and is quite tall for his age. Sketching out images helped me answer and explore questions such as how ‘goaty’ did I want him to look and more.

Then I drafted some ideas on what colors I wanted this goat character to have and what materials/textures would look good. In this stage I used more color through using watercolor paints. Seeing my pictures with colors helped me realistically visualize how the end character would look like. I was pretty set on having a Romanian ‘Iei’ (traditional blouse) as the goats shirt alongside with a hat or some other accessory.

Then, during the class time with Kelvin, I experimented with different positions and movements that my character could be expressed in. Experimenting with different body shapes, silhouettes, and action poses helped me find out how I wanted to express my character through their body and position. This was very interesting to me since it allowed me to explore different body shapes and proportions. I loved experimenting with larger torsos and smaller legs and vice versa, you really can learn a lot about a character from their body styles!

After lots of drafting ideas, I came up with three different versions of my goat character, each with different accessories (hat, vest, shirt).

Eventually, I ended up going with the option two drawing which was simply just a shirt as an accessory for the goat. Now time to start the 3D-Moddelling…. I began by using a ‘front’ and a ‘side’ picture for referencing my character.

Generally the body sculpting was pretty easy, not many issues there. Moving on to the face sculpting; I had trouble at first with the mirroring and understanding how to actually use the sculpting tools on the face surfaces. Additionally, I spent lots and lots of time on the lips of the character. Creating new edge loops, moving vertices over little by little.. Overall a very tedious and time consuming part of the modelling experience. I tried to make it look as cartoony humanly as I could, in the end I am happy with the time put into this step.

Following a YouTube UV unwrapping tutorial, I slowly began to UV unwrap my character. In previous projects I would cringe at the idea of having to UV unwrap but honestly it was going pretty well for me on this project; One might say I was even enjoying myself. After UV unwrapping each strand of hair, eyes, shirts, legs, and others, I made a rough draft of colors I would like and tested it in Maya. Seeing that everything was working and looking in check with the UV’s, I continued painting in Adobe Photoshop. I personally preferred having the Goat’s hair painted colors rather than having an image cloned over the hair UV’s. I also experimented with having the Goat’s leg and arm hair being an image cloned and I seemed to prefer that to a simple brown color due to the level of detail being raised slightly.

The longest part of the UV painting process was the shirt of the Goat. I wanted it to look more native to Romania so I used a couple real life picture references (shown below) and tried to make it my own but painting in Adobe Photoshop could get lot more precise and detailed than I thought it could. Using straight lines and premade shapes helped me to stay neat and organized while making the shirt. While in the end I did somehow end up with lots and lots of layers, since it was my first time using Adobe Photoshop, I absolutely love how my Goat and his materials turned out.

Now for the rigging……….AGHHHH.. The most confusing part of it all for me. At first everything went okay, I was able to create a skeleton using QuickRig and to skin / paint skin weights for my Goat character. Then when I would attach an animation file to my character, it would go all wonky. True, my Goat was not arranged initially in a T-pose (arms were to the side and legs were bent since goat’s legs are bent) so it did make the stance pose irregular. Additionally, I attached the joints opposite (right on the left side and left on the right side) so that when I applied an animation to the goat, it would start playing in the opposite directions (inverted). This was a relatively easy fix, just re-doing the skeleton and painting the weights again. Upon doing so I noticed that my skeleton was still being irregular when being assigned to an animation. I ended up spending a whole class time (3 hours) with Kelvin trying to figure out and fix what the issue was. In the end, the solution was to remove the character definition I initially had created in the NON T-pose, and placing the character in a T-pose while re-defining the character definition. This ended up working but it did cause issues since my mesh was not made in a T-pose originally. In the first two pictures below you can see that the shoulder mesh was weird and non-uniform. It was not to bad of a fix since I just had to move each of the vertices and lines to make it seem more neat. Next there was an issue where my characters eyes would not move with the head movements. It seemed like there was an offset to them so I solved the issue by painting the head skin weights fully instead of the automatic skin weights which were half the strength. In the end, I was able to upload my character OBJ and FBX file into Mixamo and test out various animations to my liking. I found that using an OBJ file and Mixamos quick rigging was more efficient than using my characters FBX file and the skeleton I made before-hand.

Fixed the issues pictured above:

I noticed that I was quite ahead of most of my classmates so I decided to try and make a bear as well. In the Romanian tradition I choose, a goat and a bear would dance together to help commemorate the beginning of the new year; It would be nicer if I could have my goat character and the bear dance together for my final animation video. Starting off the same way I learned to do for my goat modeling, I began to model my bear. While doing ok on modeling one side of the bear, when I mirrored the bears mesh, it would act all wonky and hide certain vertices under the created mesh. I would have to go in and remove vertices individually which got pretty annoying. I tried to keep the mesh clean and neat but tit kept getting very messy and difficult to work with. Later on I UV unwrapped the bear mesh to add more detail to the eyes and the color of the skin. The UV map was a mess but I hoped that the red shirt of the bear would cover up any mesh inconsistencies.

Taking a break from the bear and the annoying mesh issues there, I decided to start on the scene. Using two different premade models, I tried running a snow particle animation on both to see which I liked more. While the first one is definitely more detailed and immersive I thought the second scene was more simple and would let the attention be on my goat when in the scene.

After deciding on the second scene as the one I liked the most, I added a sky dome with a panoramic background and added in two lights to help create a twilight atmosphere for the scene. I was also having trouble creating a mesh from the falling snow particles so I just created many white planes and layered them on top of the ground, house, and trees. I then sculpted parts of the plane to stick up and under the ground to make it look like piles of snow.

Rendering some images of the house and snow to see if I liked the size of the snow particles.

As I tried to put my bear OBJ and FBX files into Mixamo to get an animation for my bear, I noticed there were tearing issues with my mesh (probably some mesh issues I didn’t see as I was fixing it beforehand). In the end, I decided it was too late to go back and repair the mesh since I already did the UV unwrapping and material adding from Adobe Photoshop. I have added images here showing the mesh mess-ups as to show why I can’t use any animation movement on the bear. Sad I can’t use the bear in the end but I did run through the steps I learned for the goat and it helped me understand more how to create characters in Maya.

Video drafts of scene with camera movement, snow practical effect, and dancing goat. Surprisingly, I didn’t have much issues with rendering as I did in the previous Virtual Principles project. I think having lots of time to do rendering helped me feel less stressed and allowed me to have more time to make adjustments and such.

Final Video with all animations and final animation at end:

Just the final animation video:

I choose my goat to dance the northern soul dance since it looks the Romanian traditional Hora dance which is preformed at many Romanian celebrations including this one. traditionally this celebration occurs at the end of Christmas and at the beginning of the New Year so the snow and winter scene match the season in which the ‘Capra’ dance is preformed in. The Goat dances from door to door with other carolers and this tradition is originally from the ancient Romans celebrating the ancient Greek gods and fertility. Additionally the music playing over the scene is traditional Romanian folk dance music which would and is heard during many celebrations in Romania. An example of the ‘Capra’ dance in Romania is shown below.

In the end I am very satisfied with my project and my character. I like how the goat looks in action shots of the animations, he looks very clean and cartoony.

Critical Appraisal for Virtual Spaces:

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