Digital Animation fun

[Guest WyattEarp]

been learning Autodesk Maya 2011 in school. Autodesk Maya is a 3d Digital Animation program. I just got finished with our first major project last week. This one isn't animated, we're just learning the basic right now. but here's a few screenshots. Currently working on a red wagon project, and then next will be our first animated project, which will be a space battle.

After the semester is over, I'm going to model my CZ 75 P-07 handgun, just to keep my skills sharp.

if anyone's interested, you can get a 3 year free trial of most of Autodesk's products

Autodesk Education Community

you don't have to have a .edu email address or actually even be in school, just put some info of a nearby university.

these programs are tedious and time consuming to learn, but there are plenty of resources out there on the internet (youtube, .pdf tutorials on Autodesk's website) and other places that can teach you how to use these programs. They are an invaluable asset if you were to ever need a job, and being how this is Nashville, there quite a few digital animation shop's around that are always hiring.

[LagerHead]

My son would love this. I am going to make sure he sees this link so he can decide if he wants to use it in games he is working on.

[peejman]

Nice renderings!

[Guest WyattEarp]

how bout a little Red Ryder Hot Rod???

This one was very very time consuming. I spent 30 hours of my weekend working on this one, plus the last 2 weeks. thankfully it's done with. very technical, complicated and the attention to detail is demanding, but it was interesting to say the least.

[jcj]

Very cool! Wish I had that level of talent. Programming? No problem. Creative stuff, not so much.

[Guest WyattEarp]

hmmmm, whatever will it become? modeling legos for our final project. decided to get the complicated stuff out of the way. just got started tonight. Finished product won't be for another 5 weeks.

take a stab at a guess as to what it will be.

[Guest 6.8 AR]

I like Choo Choos, Red Ryders and Legos. Brings back good memories. Cool pics, also.

[Guest WyattEarp]

part 1 of the Space Battle.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Hi Wyatt. The renders look great. Looks like fun.

The surface in your bottom two aircraft renderings-- Is that a texture surface or a lightly-applied bump map?

In the 1990's and early 2000's I occasionally made 3D rendering for "photo-realistic" simulated control panels in software programs. The last few years when I've needed such, we have hired artists to make the images. Current fashion in computer GUI has drifted away from "fake photo-realism" to more abstract "could never exist in the real world" knobs, sliders, buttons and indicators. Artists may employ 3D programs in the toolbox nowadays, but often it seems that photoshop-type tools are the main weapon in the artists' armaments.

There is philosophical conflict in design of "control-dense" program windows--

** The approach advocated by Apple and Microsoft would use the bog-standard system controls everywhere they can be used, and in cases where the standard controls are inadequate, use alternate controls which look-and-feel as much as possible like the standard system controls. The problem with any kind of extension to a system control set, is that MS and Apple follow their own fashion whims, so if in the past you constructed a slider or switch intended to stylistically match as good as possible MacOS 10.3 controls or WinXP controls, then those efforts look pitifilully mis-matched against the new fashion statements in the standard controls of MacOS 10.7 or Win 7.

** So the most future-proof "standard" use of controls would simply NEVER use any control which does not exist in the relatively small standard OS set of controls (buttons, checkboxes, etc). Unfortunately, certain kinds of programs such as music, video or graphic arts are difficult to elegantly operate if one NEVER uses anything except standard system controls.

** Therefore another diametrically-opposed approach would be to custom-design all the controls in a window (so they can all stylistically match each other) and use NO standard OS controls in such windows.

** There can be perceptual/operational advantages if every window has its own unique "look". By analogy, when operating a hardware studio or live audio mixing console, the operator has too many "artistic" things to think about than to have to think about the minutia of the mixer and outboard equipment. It seems a big advantage that each piece of outboard gear in a hardware equipment rack tend to have different-colored, different-shaped, differently-laid-out controls. There isn't much chance of confusion that you would be mucking with the controls on a limiter box while mistakenly thinking you are tweaking a reverb box in the rack. You are not thinking about the boxes, you are thinking about the music, and the unique appearance differences between each box helps make the operation of the devices more transparent without having to get distracted by the mechanics. If every box had the same appearance of knobs, same color, and similar layout, then you would more frequently have to stop and read the legend under each knob to make sure you are tweaking the right one.

** I think that perceptual advantage is also relevant in software studios. If the same OS controls are used in a mixer window, a peak limiter window, a reverb window, then other than being familiar with slightly different layouts in the different windows, you occasionally have to take away attention from doing yer job to read what is in a window and identify the needed knob or button. But if the Peak Limiter window looks entirely different than the Reverb window, then it is obvious at a glance what you are dealing with, without having to take time thinking about trivialities.

Anyway, sorry for drifting off at a tangent. It is just the main way I've been "involved" with graphics design, for program windows.

====

When I was doing 3D rendering was mainly with an old program called Raydream Designer, first on 68K Mac Quadra 700 and 900 with 8 or 16 megs memory and 1 GB hard drives that costed $1000 apiece. Later on Raydream Designer was also ported to Win95 and ran a little faster there, but not much. Raydream Designer eventually got merged/morphed into a product today known as Carrera.

DAZ 3D - 3D Animation Software: Carrara by DAZ 3D

In those days it was not uncommon to require up to 24 hours for the puter to make a final output render of a complicated scene. Sometimes the computer would crash before finished and you would have to do it again. It was a good idea to have computer UPS because just one power flicker in the 24 hour period would ruin the work and you had to reboot and start it over. Multitasking was far from bulletproof, so once you started a render you didn't dare use any other programs or touch the mouse or keyboard on the rendering computer until it was done. So if you only had one computer, you were dead in the water for up to a day before doing any more work until the render was finished.

It was fun working with Raydream because it was a "blast from the past" of old paper drafting classes back in school. Everybody in an engineering major had to take at least a year of drafting. You had to learn the basics of how to do it even if you might lack the artistic talent to avoid being fired if you actually attempted to get a job as a draftsman. It was also a blast from the past from old geometry classes.

There are deep artistic realms involved with modeling and animation, but a lot of it seems just computer drafting on steroids?

The architecture majors got whacked the worst with drafting classes. They were expected to actually be fully competent draftsmen. I recall a sophomore architecture dorm mate staying up all night making the zillion variations of standard architectural lines with india ink, all the way across a yard-wide D sheet of white mylar. Every line had to be "perfect" and only one mistake with the india ink would ruin the entire homework assignment.

Do they teach paper drafting any more? Or is paper drafting as dead as the slide rule? It sure am easier to fix mistakes on a computer screen, compared to a piece of paper. You can only erase mistakes on paper so many times before your paper develops big ragged holes!

[Guest Broomhead]

Awesome work Wyatt!! Very nice! I am loving that space ship, those last two images look like something straight out of Hollywood. The old school train is very nice; pretty accurate too. The wagon is cool, but the flames seem to be at an odd angle, that may just be me though. Were you working off existing images or images in your head? Either way, excellent work.

I can physically draw almost anything from an existing image, and most things I can imagine. I think I am too much of a perfectionist for the digital stuff though, that and I don't have a steady hand with a mouse or touch pad. I really want to get a touch drawing pad, like a Wacom Bamboo, that I can try my hand at. I just can't see forking over the cash for one and then find out that I can't use it well enough. Plus, it seems odd to sketch without actually looking where the pen meets the paper.

Do they teach paper drafting any more? Or is paper drafting as dead as the slide rule? It sure am easier to fix mistakes on a computer screen, compared to a piece of paper. You can only erase mistakes on paper so many times before your paper develops big ragged holes!

When I was in high school, during my senior year (graduated in '99) they still taught paper drafting. It incorporated CAD after the first quarter, and then the instruction was 50/50. It was one of my favorite classes and I excelled at it. Somewhat unfortunately, it was only one semester and then you moved up to Drafting II which was solely CAD. Drafting II was full and I ended up taking CAD/CAM/CNC, which was similar, but cooler since we actually made things. I made half of an aluminum chess set on a CNC lathe, several name plates for teachers and school staff (at the teacher's direction, not because I was a brown-noser), some stuff just because the teacher wanted to experiment. It was me and one other guy in the class, led by the Shop teacher who was teaching a freshman Shop class at the same time. It was pretty much independent for the whole semester. I would love to be able to get back into that stuff again.

BTW, I still use lettering to write everything, that my writing style now. It's a PITA now though, because I have to force myself to write normal when I help my daughter with her homework.

Edited October 25, 2011 by Broomhead

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I can physically draw almost anything from an existing image, and most things I can imagine. I think I am too much of a perfectionist for the digital stuff though, that and I don't have a steady hand with a mouse or touch pad. I really want to get a touch drawing pad, like a Wacom Bamboo, that I can try my hand at. I just can't see forking over the cash for one and then find out that I can't use it well enough. Plus, it seems odd to sketch without actually looking where the pen meets the paper.

Hi Broomhead

For a long time there have been (expensive) flat screen computer monitors with stylus support, so you can draw directly on the image. Wacom still sells some of them, though so many of their models are listed "out of stock" I wonder how commercially successful they have been. Check out their Cintiq and Interactive Displays in their website's products categories.

Interactive Pen Displays and Tablets | Wacom Americas

Windows touch stylus laptop computers have been around for years. That may make more sense for people who like to draw on-screen, though the touch laptops haven't really ever "taken off" in the mass market and tend to be a little pricey and have smallish screens.

Maybe android touch pads will "take off" in bigger sizes in the next little while. That may make more sense for drawing on the image. Apple would also be fully capable of making a giant iPad but dunno if apple will ever do that. Seems more likely to happen in niches of the android market.

Wacom is selling a "bamboo for iPad" which is an inexpensive stylus configured to properly operate a screen designed for fingers rather than stylus.

Bamboo Stylus | Wacom Americas

In the future maybe small pad computers will get faster but I suspect they are kinda under-powered for serious graphics editing nowadays. However there are various remote control softwares you can run on a pad computer which mirror a host computer's graphics on the pad, and send your gestures on the pad to control the host computer. It may be that one could run a pad computer mirroring a heavy-duty graphics program on the main computer and get going in the right direction. For the best "serious" use, pen drivers would be necessary that could send pen pressure information to the host computer from the pad.

Long ago I had a wacom pen tablet. I'm not very artistic but did find some uses for it, in "precision mousing". For instance drawing detailed selection borders in photoshop editing. That was a heck of a lot easier with the pen rather than a mouse. Drives me nuts trying to do it with a mouse. Also using "pen pressure control" to operate photoshop editing tools such as blur or erase. Careful "strokes" with the pen was a lot easier than mousing and gave more controllable results.

I kept waiting to get the nerve to buy a big pen tablet but finally bought a 6" tablet to get my feet wet. For my uses, it turned out that a small tablet was a lot better than a big tablet would have been. I can do small-finger-movement doodling pretty good, and a small pad is all that is necessary for that. The more talented people who are accustomed to making expert sweeping gestures on big canvases seem more likely to benefit from a big pad. To me it feels weird to make big sweeping hand-and-arm drawing gestures and it would take a long time to learn how to get much good out of a big pad.

When the pad finally wore out, guess I didn't use it often enough because never got around to replacing it. Ain't artistic enough to benefit.

If you get a stylus pad then your daughter will have a blast with it even if you ultimately decide it is not for you.

What kind of computer do you use?

When I was in high school, during my senior year (graduated in '99) they still taught paper drafting. It incorporated CAD after the first quarter, and then the instruction was 50/50. It was one of my favorite classes and I excelled at it. Somewhat unfortunately, it was only one semester and then you moved up to Drafting II which was solely CAD. Drafting II was full and I ended up taking CAD/CAM/CNC, which was similar, but cooler since we actually made things. I made half of an aluminum chess set on a CNC lathe, several name plates for teachers and school staff (at the teacher's direction, not because I was a brown-noser), some stuff just because the teacher wanted to experiment. It was me and one other guy in the class, led by the Shop teacher who was teaching a freshman Shop class at the same time. It was pretty much independent for the whole semester. I would love to be able to get back into that stuff again.

That sounds like fun! It would be fun to break the bank and buy a computer mill if I ever had time to play with one. Maybe if I live long enough to retire and can afford to to get one. Even the smaller nice "hobby" cnc mills are rather big and weigh hundreds of pounds.

[Guest WyattEarp]

Hi Wyatt. The renders look great. Looks like fun.

The surface in your bottom two aircraft renderings-- Is that a texture surface or a lightly-applied bump map?

In the 1990's and early 2000's I occasionally made 3D rendering for "photo-realistic" simulated control panels in software programs. The last few years when I've needed such, we have hired artists to make the images. Current fashion in computer GUI has drifted away from "fake photo-realism" to more abstract "could never exist in the real world" knobs, sliders, buttons and indicators. Artists may employ 3D programs in the toolbox nowadays, but often it seems that photoshop-type tools are the main weapon in the artists' armaments.

When I was doing 3D rendering was mainly with an old program called Raydream Designer, first on 68K Mac Quadra 700 and 900 with 8 or 16 megs memory and 1 GB hard drives that costed $1000 apiece. Later on Raydream Designer was also ported to Win95 and ran a little faster there, but not much. Raydream Designer eventually got merged/morphed into a product today known as Carrera.

DAZ 3D - 3D Animation Software: Carrara by DAZ 3D

In those days it was not uncommon to require up to 24 hours for the puter to make a final output render of a complicated scene. Sometimes the computer would crash before finished and you would have to do it again. It was a good idea to have computer UPS because just one power flicker in the 24 hour period would ruin the work and you had to reboot and start it over. Multitasking was far from bulletproof, so once you started a render you didn't dare use any other programs or touch the mouse or keyboard on the rendering computer until it was done. So if you only had one computer, you were dead in the water for up to a day before doing any more work until the render was finished.

It was fun working with Raydream because it was a "blast from the past" of old paper drafting classes back in school. Everybody in an engineering major had to take at least a year of drafting. You had to learn the basics of how to do it even if you might lack the artistic talent to avoid being fired if you actually attempted to get a job as a draftsman. It was also a blast from the past from old geometry classes.

There are deep artistic realms involved with modeling and animation, but a lot of it seems just computer drafting on steroids?

The architecture majors got whacked the worst with drafting classes. They were expected to actually be fully competent draftsmen. I recall a sophomore architecture dorm mate staying up all night making the zillion variations of standard architectural lines with india ink, all the way across a yard-wide D sheet of white mylar. Every line had to be "perfect" and only one mistake with the india ink would ruin the entire homework assignment.

Do they teach paper drafting any more? Or is paper drafting as dead as the slide rule? It sure am easier to fix mistakes on a computer screen, compared to a piece of paper. You can only erase mistakes on paper so many times before your paper develops big ragged holes!

Thank Lester, I'm having so much fun with this class. it stinks my class schedule is already mapped out for the next 2 semesters, but my final semester I'm taking the Advanced Digital Animation class as a filler, but I've found a bunch of tutorials and stop to keep me occupied and keep my skills fresh until I take the adv. class in Spring '13.

The spacecraft has a color texture on it to start, then i had to map the decals out and resize and move it to fit properly. Then i added a solid fractal 3d texture to give the appearance of raised and lowered panels and cockpit glass, a solid fractal 2d texture for the dirt, connected all the texture shaders and then mapped it onto the ship. tedious but fun and rewarding once it was done.

I'm really starting to like the possibilities of knowing how to do digital animation and what it could bring in the future.

I want to get DAZ 3D and learn it!!!!! That program looks so killer!

Awesome work Wyatt!! Very nice! I am loving that space ship, those last two images look like something straight out of Hollywood. The old school train is very nice; pretty accurate too. The wagon is cool, but the flames seem to be at an odd angle, that may just be me though. Were you working off existing images or images in your head? Either way, excellent work.

I can physically draw almost anything from an existing image, and most things I can imagine. I think I am too much of a perfectionist for the digital stuff though, that and I don't have a steady hand with a mouse or touch pad. I really want to get a touch drawing pad, like a Wacom Bamboo, that I can try my hand at. I just can't see forking over the cash for one and then find out that I can't use it well enough. Plus, it seems odd to sketch without actually looking where the pen meets the paper.

BTW, I still use lettering to write everything, that my writing style now. It's a PITA now though, because I have to force myself to write normal when I help my daughter with her homework.

Thanks Broomhead, this is only the basic class too, i cant wait till i get into the advanced class. we might have to trade services. You teach me to draw, I'll teach you digital animation, lol. I can't draw for crap! I took a drawing I class summer 2010, and I did ok in it, but I didnt think i was all that good at. I'm better on the computer.

If you want a cheap affordable graphics tablet, I recommend this

Vistablet | Products | The VT 12 Silver

I've used it photoshop a few times and it integrates seamlessly. Also with Maya animation, you don't need a steady hand. It's all done with shapes and stuff. you can scale, cut faces, bevel edges, reshape curves by snapping to grid points, move select vertices, edges, and all kinds of stuff!

A guy on a local mustang forum that does digital car renderings gave me the inspiration to go to college and learn all of this stuff. It's my hopes one day to design digital renderings of cars and shoot photography for the NFL after I'm done with school. I saw his renderings and I said I want to do that! So off to school I went to learn how!

Hi Broomhead

For a long time there have been (expensive) flat screen computer monitors with stylus support, so you can draw directly on the image. Wacom still sells some of them, though so many of their models are listed "out of stock" I wonder how commercially successful they have been. Check out their Cintiq and Interactive Displays in their website's products categories.

Interactive Pen Displays and Tablets | Wacom Americas

Windows touch stylus laptop computers have been around for years. That may make more sense for people who like to draw on-screen, though the touch laptops haven't really ever "taken off" in the mass market and tend to be a little pricey and have smallish screens.

Maybe android touch pads will "take off" in bigger sizes in the next little while. That may make more sense for drawing on the image. Apple would also be fully capable of making a giant iPad but dunno if apple will ever do that. Seems more likely to happen in niches of the android market.

Wacom is selling a "bamboo for iPad" which is an inexpensive stylus configured to properly operate a screen designed for fingers rather than stylus.

Bamboo Stylus | Wacom Americas

In the future maybe small pad computers will get faster but I suspect they are kinda under-powered for serious graphics editing nowadays. However there are various remote control softwares you can run on a pad computer which mirror a host computer's graphics on the pad, and send your gestures on the pad to control the host computer. It may be that one could run a pad computer mirroring a heavy-duty graphics program on the main computer and get going in the right direction. For the best "serious" use, pen drivers would be necessary that could send pen pressure information to the host computer from the pad.

Long ago I had a wacom pen tablet. I'm not very artistic but did find some uses for it, in "precision mousing". For instance drawing detailed selection borders in photoshop editing. That was a heck of a lot easier with the pen rather than a mouse. Drives me nuts trying to do it with a mouse. Also using "pen pressure control" to operate photoshop editing tools such as blur or erase. Careful "strokes" with the pen was a lot easier than mousing and gave more controllable results.

I kept waiting to get the nerve to buy a big pen tablet but finally bought a 6" tablet to get my feet wet. For my uses, it turned out that a small tablet was a lot better than a big tablet would have been. I can do small-finger-movement doodling pretty good, and a small pad is all that is necessary for that. The more talented people who are accustomed to making expert sweeping gestures on big canvases seem more likely to benefit from a big pad. To me it feels weird to make big sweeping hand-and-arm drawing gestures and it would take a long time to learn how to get much good out of a big pad.

When the pad finally wore out, guess I didn't use it often enough because never got around to replacing it. Ain't artistic enough to benefit.

If you get a stylus pad then your daughter will have a blast with it even if you ultimately decide it is not for you.

What kind of computer do you use?

That sounds like fun! It would be fun to break the bank and buy a computer mill if I ever had time to play with one. Maybe if I live long enough to retire and can afford to to get one. Even the smaller nice "hobby" cnc mills are rather big and weigh hundreds of pounds.

as I told Broomhead, Full Size Tablet for $139.

Vistablet | Products | The VT 12 Silver

[Guest WyattEarp]

2nd space ship. getting ready to animate the Space Battle scene!

[DaveTN]

Catia Solids

[Guest WyattEarp]

I will have to post up the space battle scene later, but here's the renderings for the Lego Project. This was the final project, it was a tough one, I need more practice at setting keyframes to do the actual animation. I'm far better at doing the modeling than I am adding the motion.

my smug mug is having issues with uploading video for some reason, so I will try to upload them to my youtube later.

[Guest WyattEarp]

Here's the lego animation video

http://drewgphotography.smugmug.com/photos/1630122330_WQLQcxB-1280D.mp4

[Guest WyattEarp]

Space Battle video is up!

http://drewgphotography.smugmug.com/photos/1630947118_8gdmK8V-960D.mp4