Maya Tut Making the alien

As a mandatory part to this project is to make and animate a Character and place them onto a turntable.

Starting off Mat(tutor) gave us concept to use as a reference for our modelling, this is very useful because I'm not good at designing characters.

After the first hour this is as far as i got

I really enjoyed modelling this alien from the concepts

Creating the base look of the alien but not fully finished, and doesn't have my own little spin on him to make him mine and not just a copy.

This week we talked about rigging, this  looks very complex but I have done rigging before however the controls is something new so the rig/skeleton was very quick but the controls where very complex, especially with the setting up on the limiters so the model hopefully wont mess up or distort in odd ways.
However I came up with a problem.

I had created two hips within the rig this means when i was using the limiters to fix positions and lock off some rotations, it did apply the locks however when I moved the second hip which I didn't know of it really confused me and I was left on this little problem for a while until my tutor found it and old me what went wrong this was easily fixed but did set me back to reset the rig.

Note must check over rig before setting limiters on the rig with the controllers.

This week IK handles something complete new to me and having to reset the leg rigs and change them to the IK handle and they work amazing well especially with a controller on the foot. Here is just a example of the controls and the limits which effect the base of the foot and adding set controls such as ToeTip I can easily control the foot without much trouble.




WEIGHT PAINTING, this was the bane of my life! With the tutorials from my tutor this was still a nightmare and was the worst thing in the world because the very time I painted some stupid reason it just kept on resetting every time but found ways around this now but is still the worst thing i've come across in maya!

Note: Give plenty of time if I ever do this horrible thing again.

Final alien complety finished and has a animation, ready for Unity and creating the turn table for this guy

Overall really happy with this guy, main problems were the weight painting, and setting up controller limits less so.

Animation for the dude :)