Animation

 Before I started my animation, I created a story board like walk cycle to help me create the animation, it was simple but easy for me to understand, in the pass I've had trouble creating walk cycles because I'm terrible with sequencing. But creating a story board really helped me do the walk animation. The numbers and arrows show what frame I'm going to start and finish at and the L & R on the feet shows me which is left and which is right, this helps me a lot since I'm not very good at sequencing so this gives me a struchterd organised way of animating.







Today I used the IK tool in Maya to animate my robot, it made things easier and gave me easier ways to move my simply rigged robot to move more dynamically. I did simple animation, moving the forwards back and forth then going back and making some adjustments y going off what I planned in my story board.

You can see the top leg join is connect to the ankle, because that's the main joins that move, the knee joint inbetween moves by its self when using the IK tool.When doing this I moved one leg forward and one backwards and key framed that position. After I went to frame 20 and did the legs in the opposite position it was on the first key frame, when played it just looked like the robot was sliding back to forth. But because of my story board I moved the ankles where I thought they should be picked up and when played it looked like the robot was walking.

When in our group, Dilon, the lead designer asked me to do a Meltdown animation, where his head pops off but do it in the funny way, because in game you brake the robot, he need an animation for it to work.it was decided I could do this anyway I wanted, so i decided to make the robot do a little catwalk before he melts down. I did a Storyboard and how many frames I would use before this


in the picture you can see how I wanted the robot to move, and when and which frame everything was going to happen. I followed my storyboard and I manged to get the walk I wanted, it's featured in the video below.

Rigging

Today I learnt how to rig my robot. I painted weights on the joints by naming each joint where it was placed on the body part, this made it easier to find each joint and paint the parts I didn't paint. While painting you can turn the value down to 'rub out' any excess weight you don't want, so this means you can turn your model when you select a joint, and it will turn smoothly whatever way you turn it. This makes it easier, when rigging you also add bones, you do this by using the joint tool and selecting from the bottom half of the body to the top the certain points you would want to move. you do this again with the limbs and parent them to the middle body joint so they are all connected. You then bind these joints to the skin using the ridged bind tool, this is so when you move the joints the skin will move too, but in this case it rotates the joins with the skin still connected.As you can see I showed that my weighting worked by moving the leg, and the mesh doesnt move with it like it did before.

Group

Being in the group I feel like I have done the most work even though I don't have many objects, the others haven't textured or designed everything. I was given less to work on because I was given the task to create a model, which I am still learning to make in a productive manner. I have never added joints and rigs before and I feel like this will take some time, even though I only have 2 weeks left to complete the final product 

New model

(After and before)

I was told to design I way that my character can bend his arms and legs just like in real life, so I changed the robots arms and legs so when I rig the character it will be easier for the character to move. First I googled robots and observed how the arms and legs move and designed it in a way that would make sense.

doing this can really improve on my final product, I am falling behind because my first model crashed, and I've only been able to create other objects, but I have manged to texture the toilet, bed and the robot. I have also added joints to my robot after replacing the arms and legs, this was an easy process as I have looked at videos on how to do it before, but I think rigging my character will be difficult and I will need some help understanding how to do it. 

UV Texture and problems on the way

When building my robot, I worked on some of it at home, when I fully built the machine I went into college and the file corrupted, this meant I had to start from scratch again, so the whole of my Thursday was building the robot again, I don’t know why it corrupted but after I built my robot again, it was making Maya laggy and there wasn’t any huge really why it would be so laggy, so Katy let me used her laptop where it worked perfectly and I could create the UV'S. I have never done UV's before but found a way when wire framing to make it easier than unnetting the mess that was there, You select the faces on the front (or back) now here else and then click on Planlar mapping, because my robot body was relatively square and flat, I didn’t have to chance anything, other than the size to fit the UV map. When I was doing the arms and legs which are more rounded I used Cylindrical mapping instead, where I did have to chance things, so I had to rotate and make it smaller or bigger and stretch it, and when I think it’s right I just make it smaller to fit into the UV mapping.

Then after I finished the UV mapping, I saved the picture of the UV mapping and put into SAI, a drawing tool I'm more familiar with than Photoshop. I made the wire frames visible and put in a new layer, turned down the opacity on the wire frames and coloured over using the air brushed tool, colouring wasn’t hard since the robot is meant to be grey and have red eyes, but once I finished this I put it onto the robot and it perfect.

 

(Renderd but not smoothed)