This article was printed in the 1998 siggraph issue
of 3D Design magazine, for an article Alex Alvarez wrote entitled 'Organic Modeling and Animation in Maya V.1',

Alex is director and instructor at Gnomon Training Center, a HIGHEND3D.COM strategic partner. Alex teaches advanced
acharacter nimation classes covering these techniques and many more at Gnomon. I have learned a great deal from his
animation classes and highly recommend anyone interested in character animation to take his classes.

click on the images below for captions and larger size.





Over the past three years Alias|Wavefront has developed a flexible, intuitive and powerful package for high-res character development and effects for film. While the inflated pricing may seem daunting---almost $50k for all modules---there is no question that the software is amazing. While there are not necessarily an incredible number of new technologies within the software, as it is mostly based upon Power-Animator, Dynamation, and Kinemation, the integration of several pre-existing technologies with complete optimization for current hardware is a substantial feat.

As a character designer and animator, I have struggled for the past five years with software which kept me from incorporating the spontaneaity and expression possible with traditional media. Due to software and hardware constraints, the production pipeline for high-res film bound characters has been forced to rely on several techniques which slowed productivity and restricted less technical artists from feeling comfortable with the tools. The need to use multiple packages, namely Alias for modeling, SoftImage for Inverse Kinematics, Dynamation for particles and soft bodies, Renderman for rendering, and a slew of proprietary software, is a testament to the limitations to each part of the pipeline, and how expensive that pipeline is.

Maya may change everything, because it can do everything. That is, everything that we have been able to do to this point, but in a single working environment. Aside from the impressive flexibility is the performance. Maya is a substantial leap over the previous norm. Maya performs faster on an o2 than PowerAnimator on an Octane MXI. While one high-res character was enough to choke PowerAnimator, thus necessitating multiple low-res project files to animate different body parts, Maya can handle several detailed characters, in a rich environment, shaded, with 50mb of textures displayed, with interactive lighting, and realtime deformations.

In this three part article I will be covering the workflow for modeling and animating Lanker, a seamless NURBs character, including body and facial set-up and animation. While it is hard to tell from screen shots exactly what kind of performance I am getting, on a r5k o2 all manipulation discussed occurs shaded, in realtime, or very close to it.

Organic Modeling for Animation

With the combination of Maya?s default deformation tools and the Artisan module, organic modeling workflow has substantially improved in both performance and intuitiveness. With PowerAnimator, the main tools for such work were Pick CV (Control Vertex) and Xform (Transform) Move. And that was pretty much it. With Maya, we now have easily editable Clusters, Lattices, Sculpts, Wires, Wrinkles, Intuitive Manipulators, and with Artisan, tablet driven sculpting, smoothing, vertex selection, deformer weight painting, and soft body goal weight painting. This is quite a new set of tools. The observation you will make, however, is that I will still use mostly Pick CV and Xform Move in the first stages. With the base geometry built this way, I will then move on to deformation based tools, or Deformers, to intuitively construct morph, or BlendShape, targets.


Figure One

The first and most important step involved in building a character is design and the preparation of orthographic drawings. Figure One shows the Image planes imported into the front and side cameras in Maya. The main thing to point out is that I am working off of only front and side drawings, due to the fact that the arms are at the character's side. I decided to model him with his arms down, just to make sure that his shoulder region looked exactly as I desired a more common, neutral position.