Little Bird
 

Hello,

I feel as though I've recovered from my last project now so I've decided to start another, let's hope that I can finish it too!!

I made this little bird this afternoon, my next job is to rig it. I should get that done tomorrow after I've braved the supermarket in search of Christmas food!

Cheers,

Mat.

ha ha - very cute! you got another animation in mind or are you keeping everything under wraps?

i do like the model because of its simplicity, but i've gotta say i think the eyes look a little buggy... almost like if he (she?) were to jump in the air they'd fall off *shrug*

Thanks,

Arran: I hope to make this into an animation but I'm sure that everyone that knows me on this forum, by now realises that I start more work than I actually finish!!

NeoStrider: I know what you mean about the eyes, they remind me of one of those Furby things. I hope that once it's moving they won't look too bad, I don't think that it'll be too dificult to sort out if need be though (famous last words!!).

Take it easy,

Mat.

ha ha - you get more finished than most mate!

As for the eyes, the model kind of reminded me of those little pipe cleaner plastic chicks that you used to get at easter with the glued on eyes that were usually pointing in different directions, if you know what I mean.

now that i look at the pic again i think it's just cause the iris of the eye is so large compared with the rest of the eye... what would it look like if you added more white to the texture (to make the iris smaller)?

i want one...

i like the model, gives a lot of animation options,the buggy eyes are pretty cool too

1 crit right now is that the feathers look too sharp i think they should be puffier like down because it looks to me like its a chick

looks cool though:beer:

haha another creation by matt which is amazing... looks like a cute character and will look fun when fully rigged up and animated.

lol ... that seems to be my problem aswell, as soon as i get stuck into something cool and is neally finished, sometimes passes my mind and then i start to work on that while the other one just sits there and gathered dust on it,

crap double posted, sorry... page didnt load so i double clicked on it again :angery:

Okey-Dokey,

Little Bird is now fully rigged and skinned. I've adjusted the Iris and lengthened the fur a touch, hopefully they look a little better now.

I've got an idea for a quick animation, nothing too ambitious so I'll have a bash at that later.

Cheers for your thoughts,

Mat.

Here's a picture of the rig controls if anyone is interested.

and what does half of that crap do?

cool, rigs looks pretty neat ... :) btw just curious, what do the things above the head do, never really seen them before.

"and what does half of that crap do?" they are controls for the character soo it is easy to animate... etc if he wants to move foward and then go on his tippy toes, its much easier doing it with the controls than it is click the joins and doing it individualy, it makes the animators life more easy if you get what i mean... correct me if im wrong guys, dont know how to better explain it in much more depth atm..

marlon

well i understand the purpose of making the controls, i guess i was asking what each one did. blue and red rings around feet and wings, arrows all over the place, i'm just not familiar with what each one does.

Ha! I laughed and spat biscuit on my keyboard when I read that last one of yours NeoStrider!!


THIS will show you what the controls do, I've added another one above the head since I took that last image.

I Hope it helps to make sense of the rig.

Mat.

yea that definitely helps... it seems to me like the big arrow at the bottom is instead of just selecting the root bone, same with the curvy arrow at the top instead of the neck (with the added feature of beak control). the foot controls and the ring around the torso are hella cool though.

Nice going mat, nice little vid!

If any of you guys want to play about with a rigged model I would recomment Low man for maya, its superb for getting some animation practice in without having to do all the rigging (which I'm confused on LOL)

Matt - Where did you learn your rigging from (books DVD's etc) as I would be interested in having a look into some gettin some of them that you would recommend.

Cheers

Steve

Nice setup you got there happymat27, and you explain it well in the video.

I thought this character was cool when I first looked. I liked it a lot. Then, after watching the vid, I love it! Freakin awesome controls! The slider for the wings = genius. That whole control center above the head = brilliant. I can't wait to see an animation with this chick!

I second that question, as I'd like to learn as well. Care to do a tute?:p

Great work, you've turned a simple model into something top notch!

The head and body are completely seperate, I've soft bound the body geometry to the body part of the rig and rigid bound the the head parts. So you were half right as the head controller does pick up the root joint of the head rig but it's the waist control that's parent constrained to the root joint of the torso, because I've used IK in the legs they react to the root joints movements too. The big arrow thing at the bottom is the parent of all of the other controls. I've parented the head controller to the waist controller so that the head moves with the waist too.

I just read that, I hope that I haven't confused things for you!! Hopefully the illustration will make more sense than my babbbling.

Later,

Mat.

Thanks folks,

I learnt all of my rigging techniques from books, Maya Foundation and The Modelling And Animation Handbook (from Alias Learning Tools which I guess is now Autodesk Learning Tools) and The Art of Rigging books (from CGToolkit). None of these books are particularly cheap (between £40 and £50 each) also the Art of Rgging ones aren't really for beginners but they do cover everything from rigging to production pipeline to matte painting to fur, cloth and fluids.

I'm not too sure about making a tutorial, we'll see.

Cheers,

Mat.

"If any of you guys want to play about with a rigged model I would recomment Low man for maya, its superb for getting some animation practice in without having to do all the rigging"

cool, thanks gster ;)

great video of the controls... also mat and everyone else, does anyone know where i could download some icons for the controls? im having abit of trouble finding them or are they already some default ones in maya?

cheers

I just make the controls out of EP Curves, it only takes a few seconds and I get exactly what I want.

Hello again,

I've made a start on a run cycle with little bird flapping in an attempt to take off, it's the first take so there's plenty to do to it but I thought I'd put it out in cyberspace in search of crit anyhow!

Unfortunately Birdy's a bit bald as fur, when it has a hair system attached to it, takes more than a few seconds to render in mentalray.

CLICK THIS to see some moving pictures.

Cheers,

Mat.

just watched it, looks cool ... btw how did you make it soo the shadow underneath the bird just kept on following it?

cheers, marlon

Cheers Marlon,

I've not got any lights in the scene, it's completely illuminated by Final Gather, I'm not entirely sure of the in's and out's of FG but it's got something to do with the fact that the whole 'sky' is illuminating the scene and a new FG map is calculated with each frame so the shadows fall directly under my model in each frame.

I made this picture which will make it clearer (I hope!). The red arrows represent the FG rays, they're bouncing all over the scene, when they encounter an object they will bounce off it (illustrated by the green dots) and a shadow is created underneath (or around) the object. Not very technical I know but I hope it sheds a little light (no pun intended) on the matter.

Take it easy,

Mat.

Haha, that bird is quality. The run cycle is comical - obviously in a good way. He has a lot of character for a model so simple. I think you need to make a cat now, lets get some sylvester / tweety action going on :D

ohh alright then...thanks for the picture btw, mades things more easy and i understand now :)

also another question about the animation clip of the littlebird trying to attemp to fly, did you key frame like every move/motion it did? or is there a way(which im trying to find out) where you can just key frame the first like 2seconds and just keep on copying and pasting them but changing the translate so it kept on moving forward if you get what i mean?

"I think you need to make a cat now, lets get some sylvester / tweety action going on"

haha what a great idea lol, havnt seem a scene/video/series from them in a along time.. what happend to looney tunes? they where good and fun to watch when i was a little kid,

"well thats all folks!" hehe, cheers .. marlon

The walk cycle is only 18 frames long.

Changing the post infinity curves for the limb movement, using the graph editor, to cycle and the forward movement of the master control to cycle with offset will make the character walk forward infinately. The only drawback with that way is that you can't have the character doing anything else apart from the cycling keyframes, this isn't really an issue for a straight forward walk by like I have the little bird doing though.

Hope that helps,

Mat.

ohh ok thanks, ill keep that in mind ...

also about the shadow, can you take screenshot(print screen) of your mental ray settings and all the things which have contributed in making the scene/shadow because for some reason i seem to have forgot how to do that again and yeah ived been wanting to know ... thanks again

cheers, marlon

Hello there,

there's no need for screen shots as there isn't really anything to show as far as lighting set up is concerned but.......

All you need to do is open up the rendering camera attributes (in the outliner, double click the relevant camera) and change the Environment > Background Colour to white, make sure that the ground plane has a very white Lambert shader attached to it (I used 1.2 in the R, G and B settings for this scene) and finally choose Mental Ray to render, ensure that Enable Default Light is disabled (under the Common tab) then under the mental ray tab select Production from the quality preset menu and turn Final Gather on (I left it at 100 rays in this case). Simple as that, I hope it helps.

I've not done anything to the scene in the past day or so what with christmas and all but I'll be back on to it in the next couple of days, I like the cat idea I may well do something with it once I'm happy with the bird.

Cheers,

Mat.

looking good mat ...sorry been away awhile


shoot me an email to my gmail acct. since you dont use msn .... if you dont remember I will post it ...

Ahh man a cat in the same style would be awesome, you should definately do it :)

thanks again mat, i figured out why i was not getting the shadow... mistakenly forgot to take off enable default light :S lol

marlon