Hey again this is how I created the cable that I had in my animation assignment I’ll go through how I made it and made it so that I could get it to move if my character walked into it even though in the animation I didn’t have to first here's my start for a cable just a Nurbs cylinder.

So first of all I have to make it a bit thinner so I’ll use the scale tool to do this then I’ll set it down on the grid.

Ok here it is scaled down an easy way to make sure the Nurb is exactly turned horizontal on the grid is to the up -90 in the rotation attribute in the attribute editor (p.s. you can open this by going to display and down to the UI elements and turning on the attribute editor) you can also make sure it’s just sitting on the grid by putting 0 in all the boxes for the translation attribute in the attribute editor.

After that I went to the attribute editor again and went to the MakeNurbCylinder1 at the top of the attribute editor and went onto the cylinder history section and changed the spans section from the original of 10 to 30.

After this I then changed the main menu bar menu located in the left top corner.

I set this to animation then pressed space and picked the top view and opened that up to the full display so that I could see easily then zoomed in the that I could see the spans then I went to skeleton and down to joint tool and clicked on that so that I could start then I went and put one joint into the middle of each span.

Then I went back into the prospective view and selected both the joints (all of them) and the Nurb cylinder then I went to skin and clicked went down to bind skin and to smooth bind and clicked on it.

And there we have the final version the cable can now be moved with the joints easily and makes the bend look natural because of the amount of joints and spans if you have too few joints to spans the cable can be quite wooded for the bend.

maya models

OK heres another model i made you probably saw this in my assignment animation this is my keyboard and mouse the keyboard i spent ages on it was really hard to do i actually went and counted the buttons on the keyboard then tryed to put them in unfortunately i was using a laptop keyboard as a reference so it's not that amazingly layout unfortunately anyway heres the image of them

so theres the front and side view i think it's pretty good you like it i cut the keyboard in half thats why the under side is open i did this because it didn't sit right when i put it on a table in Maya it looked really weird thankfully by cutting it in half it helped and look pretty good on a table.

anyway yet again if you have any questions plz e-mail me or comment on the blog see you on the next post :)

jack of blades

just writeing about the model i made over a few weeks it's a full character model i never showed many of the images of me makeing this model but thankfully i saved them and here are a few originally i found online the 4 veiws for jack of blades from the origional fable game and i decided to have a go at makeing him so i cut them out and started heres one of the early ones with just the head, hood and the body unfinished i made most of these by adding a nurbs sphere with around about 20 subdivides on all axis and moved the vertex in to position for the pictures that i had added in a camera views so that i could make sure they fitted nicely

as you can see below i did this quite a bit and managed to get quite far only having a few problems on whitch was pointed out later by the tutor was that the center point was in view and not hidden and would make it hard to rig later on and not move as well as it could.

for the arms though i didn't use a sphere i just used a tube it worked quite well if i say so myself  this is me nearing the end almost got everything i would have at the end

this one is pretty much the final copy although i did make a few more changes before it went in the clip for the assignment like remaking the tummy.The hardest bit in this was the hands that i finally admitted defeat at finishing before the deadline.

anyway that how i made my model i eventually rigged it but just with a basic rig as i think i posted earlier although i this one he is colored in with jack of blades colors though :) i took these out of the animation because he was to look like clay for it, so thats the jack of blades model i will be continuing on this project and hopefully getting it into zbrush to make it better i will also continue to post update about it on the blog thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed the images of the model if you have any questions plz drop me an e-mail or a comment


thanks for reading Azrael (Sam Sharp)

Here is my assignment animation finally rendered even though I've had to do so around about 5 times now because Maya settings seem to change every time i load up the program thankfully though this made it possible for the the fluid fire effect in my animation to work eventually

I'm quite pleased with the result apart from the fire effect starting before it was meant to very pleased i managed to et it up to around 55 seconds as well.

this is my model of a computer in the screen-shot is the monitor and base unit as well as a wire that i have rigged so that the connected up to each other i was really happy with the model apart from a few little bits about it first is something i just noticed that because of how i did the monitor you can see the gray "screen" from the back of the monitor but apart from that i was quite happy although i may continue to develop this further and actually open up my computer at home and model the circuit boards so that it looks like a computer inside and out.

looking at what i did for this model i'm quite happy with the amount of time it took me to build this model apart from the cable at the back originally i had quite a few of problems with this but after adding in more subdivisions into the bar that would become the cable for the computer and making sure i didn't have to many joints for the cables skeleton it came out ok. overall i though i did very well on this model and am quite pleased with it.

Heres the first draft on my Jack of blades model I've been working on for a bit he still needs to be fine tuned so i have to go over him again taking out different bits of the model and connecting it up as well as texturing him but thats for later

i have run into some problems with the rigging it's a ok rig but maya has enviably made some mistakes
so i will have to go back through and paint the effect of the joints onto the model unfortunate i've forgotten how to paint the influence of the skeleton joints

but i have found a website that has a tutorial on this so i will watch the video and then fix the rig
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TACB6bX8SN0
I should have the model properly rigged very soon.

flash

if not working see SirMortum on youtube for video