Husnain's Blog

I added all the videos that were made from Maya to my project media queue in Sony Vegas. I then added sound effects from various royalty free youtube channels such as footsteps, falling sounds and moving rock sounds. I then added the sounds to the timeline , and edited and trimmed parts that seemed too long or too short. Here is my workflow in sony vegas. The camera was keyframed too quickly on the first scene, I slowed the first scene down a lot to compensate. Because of this the video does look quite laggy during the first scene. Here is my finished project video; I am also attaching my files for the scene and models below; RAR FILE:  https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FsN9Qod5w99cj4S8rqFUPYUE85JrOHVd ZIP FILE:  https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WzihkxFc8HhVZOlqm93N-o80n92jH06m

Initially, I created my own skeleton for my character, using just the joints; Using the left and right view, I tried to match up the character and its skeleton as best as I could. And when I felt like the joints were in decent places and everything matched up, I binded the skin to the joints. Alot of regular movements were okay, although some did not work well with the joints and needed fixing. When a rigged characters skin deforms you have to weight the skin to the bone so that the least amount of distortion would happen. But a lot of the movements this character would be doing looked okay. Since I wanted to finish this project I decided to leave out the weighting. If i could go back I would put in the extra time to finish this model completely. However, I ran into a problem when I finished rigging my character. When I exported the character into my scene. I had to resize it, but when I did the rig wouldnt resize, even if it was un-binded. This meant I had to rig my charact...

I render my scenes by changing the image format to AVI format, this would render the the scene in video, but uncompressed. This would make the file size quite large. After fixing the render settings I select the Batch render option. After this my scenes are rendered and are in video format.

To keyframe my scene I must use the timeline on the bottom of the program; I keyframed my character by moving the different joints at different keyframes; After keyframing my character I created my first scene. I created a camera and keyframed it at different points. I repeated these steps a few more times for each of my scenes.

Initially my scene looks like this; I added some volumetric fog to my scene using the content browser and searching for fog; Despite these changes I felt like the scene didn't look as good as I thought it was. I felt like the textures for some of the objects and also the trees and grass didn't match the cartoony look of some of the other models and so I changed most of the scene to be toon shaded, and also got rid of the grass and trees around the edges. And added more of the blocky cartoony trees. Now that the sky and mountains and floor are also toon shaded, the scene fits really well, I also got rid of some of the fog as I felt it was too much. I also put in another spotlight for where the sun is going to be. This spotlight will cast the shadows in the scene. I also import my character to the scene also. I will start keyframing my animation to record. Here is a snapshot of my scene.

With a lot of my scene done, I wanted to create a sky dome for the scene. This would emulate the sky, but also give the scene a look as though it is actually set outside when rendered through a camera. I did this by creating a sphere, then highlighting half of the faces and deleting them. I am left with a semi-sphere. I also invert the faces, so they are facing inwards. Towards the scene. I now find an image of the sky to texture my sphere. https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?24038-Free-high-res-skymaps-(Massive-07-update!)   I chose this image to use. To use this image I have to create a spherical map of this texture. To do this, in Photoshop, I have to distort the map from its polar coordinates, which is in the filter options; With the image distorted, I can apply this to the model, and now I have a sky texture. Here is a snapshot of the scene with the skydome. To get the snapshot, I also needed to add light to the scene. I did this by creati...

I wanted the same sort of cartoony look for the other models, I toon shaded both the temple and the trees I created and placed them within my jungle scene. Here the temple fits in decently, and the trees populate a decent enough area. I also wanted to create the chest for the top of the temple, I did this by creating a cube, then extruding the top part and adding some edge loops, I finished with my model for my chest; Thats the front and back of the chest, I then separated the different parts and toon shaded each of them in different colours; Here is the model textured.

Following my previous Idea, I wanted to keep my scene somewhat cartoon like. I decided to keep my character in solid colours, I started by unwrapping my character. I created seams around the characters body so that I could colour in the different parts in Photoshop. I unwrapped my character using a Addon called auto UV unwrap. It unwraps the character but you have to place the seams around the character to get a decent unwrap. Where there are large green lines, That is where I have placed the seams. I then saved the UV image generated from this and started colouring in Photoshop. Heres what the character looked like when it is textured. At this point I felt happy about how the character looked, but I felt like it could look alot better. I wanted to make the character look like it came from a cartoon where it looked kind of blocky but you couldnt see the edges of the character as much. I wanted it to look flat and two toned. To get this look I needed to access a differen...

lastly I wanted a temple in my scene. This is going to be where the character is moving towards, and where the final scenes would take place. I want my character to enter this temple and have the door close behind, like a jumpscare ending of some sort. I want the temple to look really simple. I started by creating a box, which I scaled the top side smaller, so that the sides are slanted. I extruded and then repeated till I had a pyramid type shape. Heres the end result on how the temple looks, I also created a separate staircase, which will lead up to the top of the temple and will be placed in front of the temple. I also had an idea on another object which would set up the final scene and give the character and these objects some purpose. Heres how the temple looks with the stairs in front. My idea was to create a treasure chest on top of the temple, and the character will be some sort treasure hunter. The temple's treasure is a trap and the character will be trapped in...

I wanted to add a bit more stuff to my scene, right now it is quite empty and I want it to look like a lively jungle. Using the content browser in Maya, I am able to find a bunch of different tools and more, that I can use to create my jungle area. Here in the content browser, the models I want are in the four marked categories, Named plants and trees. After choosing the desired plant or tree that you want to use, the model is assigned to a paint brush and you can paint the trees and grass on to your plane. I left a few gaps as this is where I want my animations to take place, but so far the whole area is now covered how I want it to be, the trees cover the boundary between rock and the grass plane. And the grass is scaled quite large like a jungle.

After creating my character, I had a few ideas on what directions to take my animation in. I felt like the character resembled some sort of adventurer like Indiana Jones, so I wanted to make a scene in a jungle or desert where the character is on a journey of some sort or an adventure. I began planning my scene, I wanted the character to scale a mountain at first, but it didn't seem appropriate. I thought that since the character is some sort of adventurer, a temple would fit a lot better. I began creating a few plains for my area, the middle was where my scene is to take place, the others are surrounding scenes so the area looks a lot more natural. The surrounding areas would be mountains, this is to block off any view to under the planes or skydome, which would leave to black patches which would look odd. I used the sculpting tool to create my mountains and then textured them with a stone texture; http://seamless-pixels.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/mountain-rock-dark-texture.h...

Initially I wanted to create my character, so that I can get an idea for a story board to fit the character in. I followed a tutorial on basic modeling and created a basic 3d model character similar to the one in the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiIoWrOlIRw The person is using Blender to create his model, I took the reference images shown in the beginning of the video and created the model in Maya. In maya I created a cylinder and inserted edge loops where I thought the torso changes in shape, like the upper back which arcs out from the lower back. I added cylinders for each arm and leg, then matched them up as well as I could to the reference images by moving the vertices. In the end I had a basic but good enough 3d model to use for my animation.