Virgil gets set up in Maya
January 1st, 2008
So I’ve begun to set up my controls for Virgil in Maya. We’re basically swapping out pieces on this character in order to create the animation, in a method similar to cut out animation or something you might see on South Park.
Here you can see Maya’s Connection Editor. I’ve created a control curve for the mouth which will be a place where I can control which mouth is visible and when. I connect the “Aah_mouth” geometry visibility to the “Aah_mouth” attribute on the mouth control. When It’s set to “1″, the mouth will be visible. When it’s set to “0″, it will be invisible. The dialog will be animated by turning on and off the appropriate mouths.
Here’s the drawing of Virgil I’m working from to create the 3D model.
»
On January 2nd, 2008 at 12:00 am
This looks really cool Floyd! How exactly does the rendering for this work? Is it a hardware render, Maya software or Mental Ray?
On January 4th, 2008 at 12:00 am
The whole project will be rendered with Maya’s software renderer. We’re going to be animating the visibility on the objects to turn them on and off during the render, replacing one mouth for another, one arm for another, etc.