Figure Ten

With the head/torso geometry complete, it is time to sculpt an arm and a leg, each out of a primitive cylinder. The hand will be done separately, built from a primitive sphere for the palm and revolved surfaces for the fingers. The same sculpting techniques as mentioned above apply, but now we need to consider the areas where the arms and legs attach to the torso, and where the fingers attach to the palm. Since we are going to use the Fillet Blend tool to attach them, we can ensure good results by modeling the surfaces almost on top of each other, so that they have a visually implied continuity. When this is accomplished, we can Trim, or cut away, regions of the torso within which we will create new surfaces using Fillet Blend. This type of geometry is solely based on the two surfaces it is blending between, thus the reason for modeling the hip areas of both the torso and leg surfaces so that they flow into each other. When creating our curves on surface in preparation for Trimming, a nice new feature is the ability to make a surface 'Live' using Modify/MakeLive which allows us to intuitively draw curves directly on the surface in the perspective window. In Figure 10 the untrimmed, trimmed, and blended phases of arm and leg attachments are displayed.


Figure Eleven

With the base model complete, texture mapping followed. This was accomplished using StudioPaint3d and Adobe Photoshop. Figure 11 shows Lanker with his textures displayed in Maya, standing in an arena modeled with PowerAnimator. Due to the software's optimization for the o2's architecture, complex scenes can be manipulated with up to fifty megs of textures displayed--- the most I've tried, or needed, so far.

Preparing for facial animation

With the neutral head and figure complete, we are ready to begin using Maya's new Deformers to sculpt several morph targets for the head. The only aspects above the collar bone which will be skeleton driven are head and neck rotation. The rest will be entirely based upon BlendShape deformations, where the targets are created via Clusters, Sculpts, Lattices, Wires, Wrinkles and Artisan.


Figure Twelve

Clusters, or sets of vertices, are the only deformers which existed in PowerAnimator, and their functionality remains the same in Maya. The differences are found in editing their vertex membership and weighting. Each vertex in a cluster set has an assigned weight, being the percentage of the cluster's movement that the member will inherit. A weight of .5 means that if the cluster moves ten units, the member will move five units. Again Artisan comes into the picture for two of its tools; Paint Select Vertices, and Paint Weights. Artisan allows you to use its brushes to interactively select/deselect vertices in the perspective view. With a complex selection of vertices made, Artisan also allows you to ?save? this selection, as in Photoshop, for future use. Once vertices have been selected they can then be turned into a Cluster, which will by default give each member a weight of one. Then by selecting the vertex members of the cluster, you can activate the Paint Weights tool to interactively paint, in grayscale, directly on the surface a map; the values will determine the weight of the corresponding vertex. This grayscale map can be used for other purposes as well, as you are literally painting an image map than can be saved and loaded to or from disk. In addition, you can import an image such as a checker pattern or gradient and use it as a cluster weighting map via Artisan. Figure 12 shows an example of a cluster that would take a long time to set weights for without Artisan, but with Artisan took about a minute.