Maya Character Assignment - Character Poses

After pushing my computer to its limit doing high quality rendering I finally gathered a collection of still renders of my characters in various poses. Here they are:

The characters look at one another quizzically.

The adult plant observes the young plant closely.

The adult plant becomes disinterested in the young plant and looks away. The young plant looks down sadly.

The young plant approaches the adult plant in an attempt to develop a friendship.

The interaction ends on good terms as both the adult plant and young plant look out the window together.

Maya Character Assignment - Setting Up Character Rigs

I am in the process of developing the environment and character rigs for the Maya assignment. I have created a number of controllers using the parenting hierarchy in order to move and manipulate the various segments of the plant characters.

The controllers beneath each character allow the rotation of the flowers within their pots - the controller is the parent of the whole flower. While the bend handle allows the tip of the flower to be manipulated while keeping the stalk in place - the flower is the parent of the handle so that the bend follows the rotation of the controller.

By using layers and low quality rendering I have been able to speed up my workflow.

I have developed the kitchen interior by adding textures and shading to the various objects within the scene. I will soon import the characters into this scene and place them on the furthest windowsill in order to begin posing them within their suited environment.

I have again been referring to Dariush Derakhshani's 'Learning Autodesk Maya 2012' book which is proving to be incredibly helpful. I have almost finished modelling the above locomotive as part of one of the tutorials which has taught me a lot about the various tools, specifically how to add more edges to objects.

Maya Character Assignment - Development

As part of our 'Objects Looking For a Character' brief, we have been asked to model, texture and rig an everyday object to give it individual character. I have been working into my character designs which are an adult and baby plant pot and I feel I have made progress with where my work is going thanks to my in-lesson tutorials and self teaching from the aforementioned 'Introducing Autodesk Maya' book.

I decided to do the baby plant pot as a small Daisy and the adult plant pot as a Tiger Lily plant which I am still in the process of developing.

Plant Pot characters in production.

Kitchen interior design.

I have also been modelling an environment for the characters to be placed in. I have decided to put them in a kitchen interior, perhaps sitting on the windowsill which is out-looking the exterior. I am happy with my progress so far with the environment design.

Maya Practice

I've been spending the last couple of days working through the tutorials in Dariush Derakhshani's 'Introducing Autodesk Maya 2012' book to refresh some of my Maya skills and to help me in my 3D assignment. I'm finding the book incredibly helpful and I will hopefully be spending more time on my Maya work with more confidence soon.

A printscreen of the first tutorial where a basic solar system was created with planets and moons which moved around the sun in orbit. This helped me learn some more of the Maya animation basics and refreshed my memory of some of the common tools.

A printscreen of the decorative box from the second tutorial in the book. Creating this helped me discover some tools that I've not used before and allowed me to practice and develop my modelling skills.