the epic project of doom
 

i don't know if this is supposed to be on the newbie forum but im still a newb bwing only 10 weeks into maya so im posting it here anywayz

i am in a 3d class we have to create something in maya for the teacher every 2 weeks and after a while of making something simple just for a grade and throwing all that work away i decided i would start making things and turning em in and then using them in a larger grander scheme. I decided to have a long bad guy tear apart a fortress and kill all the good guys and have a final good guy sorta like a boss fight and make it really epic. So i drew out some ideas got it all on paper... I just need help getting it into maya. I will upload pictures later when i find a scanner although i admit they aren't much.

I will just list the problems i have run into so far...
-Does Maya have a built in physics generator?
-How am i gunna make blood spurt out of guys bein cut down?
-How do i cange the shape and color of things in key frames (if i edit a poly after a keyframe it just changes the shape for the whole thing)
-I have shoulderpads for the bad guy that are going to be skulls but the lower jaw needs to hang down over the shoulder and be on a hinge (the bad guy swings his arm the jaw might bounce up a bit)
-Is there a way to do chain mail as a cloth (as long as it looks like chain mail i dont care how its done)
-I need to learn to rig a skeleton lol i fail at that
-should i rig the head seperate from the body or same? i plan for the characters to talk alot
-Is it worth the effort to make actual blades of grass and us that or just texture something over a flat surface or neither?
-The armor of the final good guy and the bad guy glows, and the bad guy's armor is gunna need to have smoke coming out of it, blue smoke. How would i do glow effects on armor?
-What is the best way to texture skin?


thats all i can think of at the moment but any help with any of it would be awesome i have until like the end of march to figure everythign out so no rush i guess.

and also how do i simulate the sun with lighting effects haha forgot that one

In short:
Hire a studio. :beer:

Seriously this is a big project to take on, especially if you don't have much experience in Maya. Perhaps you can ask some of your fellow student's/Instructors if maybe they would like to help out. Perhaps a group project? That way you get to work on the project, and you and your class get credit for it.

If you really want to get deep into the technical aspects of a project like this, perhaps you should talk with your instructor.
I'm sure he can answer your questions, and maybe give you some hands on practice. Or at least point you in the right direction.

You've probably seen the small animated shorts on the web. If you look at the good ones, at the end when the credits start to roll. Look at how many people were actually behind making it. And then look at how long it took.

This is going to be a whopper, some of these questions really do back up the fact that you are new so I'm going to say this, you may have bitten off more than you can chew as the questions encompass texture painting, rigging, animation, dynamic simulations and FX, and the use of other programs (painting up those textures, basically being your own sound department, post process etc). You actually haven't run into "problems" on this yet, you have been wondering how to approach achieving certain effects, problems are WHEN you're actually trying to get it done and you're getting effed up results, or Maya's crashing, the renderer is crashing, this error, that error, this was working fine a minute ago wtf, this file got corrupted, why is this acting so slow!? Why is this not displaying correctly!? Dodgy info in the help files for something that seems simple, Operating System woes and the list goes on. I'm going to try to answer the questions just so you see what Mayaniac and I mean.


-Does Maya have a built in physics generator?
Yes it does, check out rigid bodies, soft bodies.

-How am i gunna make blood spurt out of guys bein cut down?
Maybe the nParticles in Maya2009 will help you out there, or if you have access to Realflow.

-How do i cange the shape and color of things in key frames (if i edit a poly after a keyframe it just changes the shape for the whole thing)
Changing color over time, a really simply of doing it is right clicking the attribute and seleing set keyframe, the timing will act different depending on type of keyframe, stepped, spline etc(check out the graph editor). Changing shapes over time, check out blendshapes.

-I have shoulderpads for the bad guy that are going to be skulls but the lower jaw needs to hang down over the shoulder and be on a hinge (the bad guy swings his arm the jaw might bounce up a bit)
I'm not sure I get that question, but the first thing I thought of was Set Driven Keys, check it out. The thing is, articulate character animation takes work.

-Is there a way to do chain mail as a cloth (as long as it looks like chain mail i dont care how its done)
I can't see why not, as long as you set the properties of the cloth so that the behaviour is believable, good texture work should take care of the "look".

-I need to learn to rig a skeleton lol i fail at that
Rig something really really simple then animate it, if it handles badly then it needs work.

-should i rig the head seperate from the body or same? i plan for the characters to talk alot
/shrug

-Is it worth the effort to make actual blades of grass and us that or just texture something over a flat surface or neither?

You can use Fur, you can use alpha planes, Paint FX, unless the camera is going to get really really really close to the grass or maybe some blades need to go flying then I don't see much point in actually modeling grass.

-The armor of the final good guy and the bad guy glows, and the bad guy's armor is gunna need to have smoke coming out of it, blue smoke. How would i do glow effects on armor?

Do you mean like a soft bloom effect? (like that effect in some glamour portraits) that can be done in post. Or like zhroom zhroom light saber affecting the lighting of surrounding objects type of effect? In that case you will have to tweak the shader to appear to be a bright surface, and you'll probably have to do some parenting and light linking if you're not going to use FG.

-What is the best way to texture skin?
I'm afraid thats a very broad question, check out some texture painting tutorials to get the gist of it.

i add to what Genny posted...

-How am i gunna make blood spurt out of guys bein cut down?
Maybe the nParticles in Maya2009 will help you out there, or if you have access to Realflow.
could can get away with doing this without nParticles. I think nParticles are only useful if you want them to collide with stuff...


-How do i cange the shape and color of things in key frames (if i edit a poly after a keyframe it just changes the shape for the whole thing)
Changing color over time, a really simply of doing it is right clicking the attribute and seleing set keyframe, the timing will act different depending on type of keyframe, stepped, spline etc(check out the graph editor). Changing shapes over time, check out blendshapes.
changing colour can be done by keying the material attributes, but i dont know how this would go with textures.... as far as i know, the only way to animate a texture is to have an animated texture.
and yeah, blend shapes are what you want to use if you want to animated modifications to the meshes (not suggested if you're using it for a game as it'd be heavy on memory and limited)

-I have shoulderpads for the bad guy that are going to be skulls but the lower jaw needs to hang down over the shoulder and be on a hinge (the bad guy swings his arm the jaw might bounce up a bit)
I'm not sure I get that question, but the first thing I thought of was Set Driven Keys, check it out. The thing is, articulate character animation takes work.
you can create a hinge for them and parent invisible rigid bodies to the skeleton so when the skeleton rotates the hidden boxes rotate and make the jaws move. although, if you want the bounce.... perhaps setdriven keys will work, but i currently don't see how that will work easily. you should be able to make the hidden rigid bodies bouncy and the jaws bouncy, but i'll leave you to decide if this works


-I need to learn to rig a skeleton lol i fail at that
Rig something really really simple then animate it, if it handles badly then it needs work.
what? a skeleton as in a skeleton model? or are you doing soft skin rigging? if it's an actual skeleton model you should be able to get away with the classic 3D Heirarchy approach. Easiest to do those approaches by parenting bones to joints
if you're actually soft skinning your characters then you just smooth bind the mesh to a skeleton and play with the weights. (you'll need to read the maya's inbuilt tutorial or go find on on the net, or get a tutorial from here with rigging in it)


-should i rig the head seperate from the body or same? i plan for the characters to talk alot
/shrug
i believe jay has answered such question in someone's blend shape head thread. (jay is the man at blend shapes)

-The armor of the final good guy and the bad guy glows, and the bad guy's armor is gunna need to have smoke coming out of it, blue smoke. How would i do glow effects on armor?

Do you mean like a soft bloom effect? (like that effect in some glamour portraits) that can be done in post. Or like zhroom zhroom light saber affecting the lighting of surrounding objects type of effect? In that case you will have to tweak the shader to appear to be a bright surface, and you'll probably have to do some parenting and light linking if you're not going to use FG.
smoke can be done with particles (there is a prebuilt smoke effect), glow can be done in post, or in maya's crude post by adding glow as the material's special effect

and also how do i simulate the sun with lighting effects haha forgot that one
with directional lights. are you going for an outdoors scene? and what do you mean by lighting effects?

Just to add to what people have said,

Break it down an plan the hell out of it, make little test scenes for the bits you need so you've got a plan of action.

When modeling remember to think about how close to the camera parts are needed, if there far ways dont model the hell out of them.

Chrone - Nparticles have somre pretty great features not just "for colliding with stuff" its also got a liquid preset setting that may be of help for this.

i remember having such wild ambitions when i first got into 3d well my best advice(from others in this forum) get the basic knowledge of modelling ,animation, rendering and the rest then you can start thinking about making short clips

Wow this sounds like a really big project and sounds like what a small studio would usually do. My advice would be plan, plan and more plan what Steve(gster123) has said. From the small bits to the big detailed bits, it will help a lot in the long run.

Just out of curiosity, how many weeks have you got for this roughly?

i'm assuming since you're in a 3D class that it's only a quarter or a semester or so?

if your animation is going to be longer than a minute or two using all the multiple characters, speech, particle effects, etc. you're not gonna have time to complete it.

try for something a little less ambitious. hell even your idea of the main character just swinging around a sword with no background would be ok.

ok so first of all im in a 3d class and my teacher knows less about maya than i do, so do the other 2 kids in the class... they had a semester to mess with the program before i got into the class too.

I don't think this is too much if i model a character each week for the rest of the semester and then rig them and skin them in another week.

I needed a sun effect for the outdoors so i can do a sort of solar flare effect by having the camera use a tracking point on that light and have the solar flare be on the shoulders of one of the characters.

I can get more help if i need it, like my friend is writing the story/script and then im getting the drama department at my school to act it out and the communications people to help me edit it (im better at sound editing than them sadly but they have software and mics that i can't afford) and i was goin to see about making it a group project and havin the other 2 kids do textures in photoshop or something but if i can handle it on my own im gunna try to do so.

I am probably wrong but i think this is completable by the end of march heh, we will sure see but if i don't have time to finish it by then ill put al the characters i have done in some kind of short short film

I love the fact that you say i should hire a studio though cause the more impossible people who know what they are talking about tell me it is the more I am gunna make sure it gets done 8 )

Don't forget you're going to have to model and texture environments and props (probably even rig some of it), animating and don't count out the render time etc :x

Solar flare effect? As far as I know, solar flares look like this:
http://i300.photobucket.com/albums/n...r_Flare_sm.jpg
Since this isn't something seen in a typical daylight setup maybe you're talking about something else?

The project isn't impossible, and I don't think these comments were meant to discourage but rather offer a realistic view on the matter.;)

Solar flare like the filter effect on a picture

and i know it wasn't discouragement but it makes tho whole thing seem more fun to know it probably is impossible 8 P

I would add the LENS flare in post (depending on the shot)... (however you can add a similar effect to lights really easily)

I had big ambitions when i started, if you dont know the basics you dont have a chance

you do know the basics, right?

I figured he meant lens flare but didn't want to assume as it could've been some crazy fantasy world where solar flares are visible to the naked eye.:eek:

yeahi know what you mean.....