Mike Milo’s Journal

I am enjoying my hiatus from work and have dusted off the personal projects that have cluttered my mind for the last year. Things I want to get done but have not had the time to do so. Being a workaholic by nature I am not able to sit idle and enjoy my rest… no sir, I am like a caged bull (pun intended)when I have nothing to do so I dust off my extra curricular projects and have at it!

That said, I have begun dabbling in Maya yet again and this time I find it to be a bit easier than tow years ago when I first picked it up. There is tons more documentation on the web and also there have been three revisions of Maya since I started using Maya 3. It is currently at v6.5 which is the version I am using and it has come a long way since then. there is cloth simulation, fur simulation, and lots of dynamics like oceans, ponds, rain etc, built right into the program now. It’s pretty amazing really.

So I began my first animated short film the other day and it’s coming along quite nicely. Click the link to see the first few scenes. Oh, it’s not going to win an Oscar or anything but I am having tons of fun. Now if only I could get paid to do this kind of stuff!

So the film I am doing is called Fireside Chat and it is inspired by a drawing I did for the back of Harry McLaughlin’s novel Ribeye the Bullbarian and the Jewel of Baloni. It’s a short story of two brothers having a conversation around a campfire. I’m not really sure if it qualifies as a story per-se as it’s really just a “slice of life” piece. More of an exercise to practice my animation. Never been much or a story guy anyway… I leave that up to Harry.

I myself have tackled the job of learning to animate in Maya and let me tell you it is very different than animating on paper yet just as satisfying. My biggest difficulty is with the process of “slow-in and slow-out” which as some of you may know is a standard thing in tradition animation. I think I’ve figured it out but it’s complicated as most of 3D animation is. The models were done by Trentity DeWitt and they’re really well done. A good sign of a great Rigger is when you can just animate and not have to tweak things to get the poses you want, and Trentity did a great job at just that.

When I first started playing around with Maya I tried to learn everything because there was no other way for me back then… not much info on the process itself out there. Now that Maya is all the rage in Film and Media it’s a bit easier to focus on what I really like to do which is animate. Originally I tried to model a character, then rig it and finally try to animate it (with disastrous results I might add).Modeling is something I believe I can get my hands around because I also sculpt on the side but rigging a character is like trying to play God. It’s very difficult and there are so many algorithms and trigonometry and all sorts of stuff I hated in school I decided to stay away from it. that, however left me with a dilemma. How do I model a character and then get it to move if I’m not going to rig it first? Hmmmmm. Well, enter Advanced Skeleton!

Yeah it’s really cool! It allows to to have a skeleton made for you and then resize it as well to fit your particular character. It’s really quite amazing and I have been having a lot of fun with it. One thing I still need to tackle though, is learning about Paint Weights. It truly baffles me. In case you do not know it, the action of “painting weights” is a thing in Maya where you tell the skin of a character how much influence it should have based on the nearest bone that is deforming and bending it. For instance, when you bend your elbow the skin across the elbow stretches but the skin in on the other side is pushed together to form a crease. If you do not “Paint Weights” in Maya to tell the program that it needs to stretch the back skin it will just push through the top skin resulting in less-than-desireable effects. Sound complicated? Welcome to my world! That’s one of the many reasons why the Incredibles was… well… Incredible!

Anyway, watch for more details as I continue down the 3d road!