Lab 2: Composition and Gesture
IDS252: 3D Animation, Spring 2015

Goals

• Become familiar with using a rigged character, focusing primarily on body gesture.
• Learn how to import objects and combine objects into a single scene.
• Experiment with composition and story through the use of framing and other visual elements.
• Deliverables: 2 images of your posed character and 1 image of a composition. See Evaluation Sheet (pdf).

Summary of Important Links and Resources

• Introduction to Maya 2016 Digital Tutor videos, especially Lesson 31 for cleaning up. -
• Camera angles and shot types are explained in Chp 3 found on cs-render in the folder: \IDS252Sp15\IDS252Resources\booksExcerpts\StoryBoarding More information can also be found in the Yale Film Analysis Guide - See 3. Cinematography; Framing.
• General Design Components (pdf)
• Using the Camera to tell a story
• Color Scheme Designer.

Part 1: Working with a Rigged Character

Getting Familiar with the Rig Controls

1. Make a Project: Create a Maya project (e.g. called Lab2Project) on cs-render in the folder IDS252Sp16/Lab2/MayaProjects/your_name Remember, once the project is created, you must set the project every time you re-open Maya to insure that Maya will save files to the right place.

2. Outside of Maya, go to the IDS252Sp16/IDS252Resources/Rigs folder on cs render and COPY & PASTE the file Ultimate_Bony_v1.0.5fixed.ma to the scenes subfolder of your project.

   Inside Maya, import this file by going to File→import, and selecting the file Ultimate_Bony_v1.0.5fixed.ma which you copied into your scenes folder. In class, we will go over how to work with the difference controls.

   

   Explore the different controls until you are comfortable and familiar with them. For example, pick an image of a figure on the web and see if you can approximate the body pose. (You can google "images person standing" or "images person sitting"). For now, don't try to be very exact. Your goal is just to understand how controls can translate into body gesture. There is no need to save anything just yet.

Creating A Pose

1. Select a person in the class to partner with.
2. Observe that everybody sits differently in a chair due to their physical structure, their personality, and how they are feeling at the time. Together with your partner, experiment with different ways of sitting in a chair, thinking about what each pose conveys about the person. If you want, you can include a table as a prop to rest your arm or foot. Pay attention to the angles of your body, head, arms, legs. After experimenting, each partner should select a single pose to model. Pick a pose that is fairly expressive and/or exaggerated. Using whatever camera you have (e.g. on your phone), take pictures of your partner's pose from several angles (front, side, back, high up, etc). Download the photos for your partner so they can place them in their Lab2 folder on cs-render to use as reference material for Maya.
3. Each partner: Open up Maya and set the project to the one you created above. Start with a new scene in your Maya project and import a clean copy of Bony. You goal is to pose Bony based on the reference images your partner took of you. Create a very simple chair and, if needed, a very simple table. These can be made from resized cubes - don't spend any time modeling these!). Make sure the chair and table are renamed (they should called "chair" and "table", and not anything like pCube1!). Scale the size of the chair and table to fit Bony.
4. Pose Bony based on the reference photos you took. Consult with your partner to see if they think you have captured the pose. Try as best you can to avoid Bony intersecting himself or the furniture or floor. Constantly rotate the view so that you can see what the pose looks like from all angles.
5. Once you and your partner are happy with your respective poses, you need to select several different camera angles to render several images. Consider the placement of the camera which 1) is from an angle that makes the pose easy to read and 2) is from an angle that enhances the meaning of the pose. Each partner should end up with at least 2 images of size HD 540 and in format jpg or png. Place your images in the folderIDS252Sp16/Lab2/FinalImages/your_name

Part 2: Composing a Scene

An animation is composed of multiple objects, e.g. the characters and the scenery. In this part of the assignment, you and your partner will share your poses in order to each make your own composition.

• Outside of Maya, copy your partner's posed character scene file (i.e. the file with extension .ma or .mb) into the scenes folder of your existing project. Also copy over the scene files of the objects you created in lab 1 (e.g. temple.mb, glass.mb, saltshaker.mb).

• Preparing Your Objects: Before using your objects from Lab 1, you need to make sure they are cleaned up. Warning - If you don't clean up the files, your composition scene file will be an utter mess thus making it difficult to transform and duplicate objects.

  If it helps, you can look at Lesson 31 for cleaning up files in the tutorial Introduction to Maya 2016.

  Otherwise, to clean up the files to do the following:

  • Open up one of your files, e.g. temple.mb
  • Select everything in the scene and delete constuction history by going to the menu Edit→Delete by Type→History.
  • Open up the outliner, Windows→Outliner.
  • Make sure that the only objects and groups in the scene are the things you want to be there. Delete everything else including any curves that were used for creating the objects.
  • Make sure everything is named. pCube1 is not an acceptable name!
  • If not already done, group things that belong together, renaming the group appropriately.
  • Finally, group all the geometry into a single group and name it according to what the object is (e.g. temple).
  • Make sure the grouped object is sitting at the origin (or wherever is appropriate).
  • With the group selected, select the menu "Modify→Freeze Transformation" to zero out the transformation node values.
  • With the group selected, set the pivot point in an appropriate place on the object. Holding down the d key will give you access to the pivot (Alternatively, on Windows, you press the "Insert" key to move the pivot point. On a Mac, you press "fn" key an "Enter" key). Pivot points will become much more important when we begin animation.
  • If you are using the default lambert1 material, you must replace it with a different material that you create (see discussion below on Colors).
  • Save the scene file.
  • Repeat for the next scene file in the project.

• Colors: A consistent color scheme can help give a sense of unity to your final image. For this exercise, all your objects should be solid shades from a palette of only 2 colors, plus white and black. The two colors should either be two complements or two analogous colors, e.g. see the color scheme designer - use Free style with 2 colors. You should choose a color palette ahead of time so that you can set the colors of your different objects to fit in with the color scheme.

  In the last lab, you learned how to give an object a color by assigning it a material. You need to right click on it and select "Assign New Material". Select either a Blinn or Lambert material. In the Attribute editor, click on the the gray square next to the word Color and, in the color selector window which opens, select a color. For now, ignore all the other parameters.

  Note, you can easily change the color of Bony to fit your color scheme. Just go to Windows→Rendering Editors→Hypershade and then select Bony's material node.

  As mentioned above in the "Clean-up" list, it is important that you not use the default lambert1 material otherwise you will have conflicts when you import multiple objects.

• Importing Objects: Once the objects in the individual scenes are cleaned up, you can now combine these objects into one scene as follows.

  • Create a new scene and save it into project folder (e.g. call it composition.mb)
  • Go to the main menu in Maya and choose File; Import....
  • Select one of your previous scenes to import. The object should appear in this new scene.
  • Repeat to import several more objects. You will need to translate the different objects so they aren't on top of one another.
  • At a minimum, you should import both posed characters along with several other objects.

• Composition: In the scene you just created, arrange/duplicate/scale/etc the different objects in a way that tells a story or makes the viewer curious. Remember that we use the term "story" very broadly. Be careful to think about things such as framing, negative space, symmetry. Note, in the class critique we will discuss the questions in the Evaluation Sheet (pdf)

• Rendering: Once you are done putting together your composition, take time to select a camera angle and location. Consult with your partner. Render an image with size HD540 using the format png or jpg.

• Images to turn in: Copy the image of your composition to same folder containing your other images (IDS252Sp16/Lab2/FinalImages/your_name) which should now contain 3 images: 2 angles of your posed character and the composition. Please name them accordingly.

• Project Folder Organization: Your project folder, Lab2Project, should be on cs-render in the folder IDS252Sp16/Lab2/MayaProjects/your_name. Please clean-up your Lab2Project folder as follows:

  • If you don't already have a backup of this folder, make one now!
  • Make sure that your final scene files are appropriately named (e.g. templeCleaned.mb, handCleaned.mb, saltshakerCleaned.mb, pose.mb, composition.mb).
  • Delete all other scene files, i.e. the ones that are no longer used.
  • In the "images" folder of your project, delete all images files except for your final .jpg (or png) images. Most importantly, remove any files with an *.iff extension since these are really big files!

Evaluation

This lab is due at the date given at the top of this lab. It will be graded based on the criteria sheet (see link at top). There will be a peer evaluation in class on the day it is due. It is important that you are present for the critique regardless of whether you managed to finish the assignment or not.

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