I decided to model a spider, which seemed to be an easy asset to do for the beginning. I found some tutorials in the Internet that would help me with optimizing the parameters of the model.

To create smooth shape I used NURBS and after achieving the wanted results converted into polygon primitives. When the model was done I made joints for the legs. I went with a five joints per leg, even though a spider has only one joint on knees. I struggled a bit while putting the IK handles because the legs were bending in unwanted positions. I was playing around with them until Maya decided to align it properly and the legs started working as they should. After the IKs were ready I spent some time on learning how to set up helpers.

After making a rig for the legs I added the spine. I created a several ones that didn’t work well and came up finally with a decent working one.

I applied undercoat of UV map and added a coat of fur on top of that. I used a squirrel fur with switched off specular.

Begining of the Rigging project.

In this term we are going to learn how to rig objects in Maya. This topic since we got to know has been as well worrying me as intriguing. Right now after the first tutorial as I got more or less what our tutor had to tell us I'm quite excited and await for more. I will be regularly updating this blog with notes about the lectures I've gone through, my personal progress on the project, hints and good practices on rigging and interesting things found in the web.

Firstly what's rigging? First time I heard about rigging was in the previous term. We had a lecture with a guest from Ninja Theory who told us that there is need for riggers in the games industry. Shortly he explained that rigging is actually putting together pieces of a model so it can be animated. For me it was one of more obscure jobs in the industry.

During todays lecture we learned about hierarchy of objects and parenting. We were also given a usefull link with plenty of tutorials. http://www.guerrillacg.org/

Parenting is aligning pieces of an animated object in a way that one is stuck to the another one, in such a way that the parents moves affect the parented object but not the other way around. This means that if the parent is a plate and an orange is parented, when you move around the plate the orange will stay stuck to it, but when you grab the orange it will move without the plate.

To parent an object in Maya firstly we click the object that is supposed to be parented holding shift and then the parent and then click capital P.

With some objects we need to change to center of pivoting by clicking Insert and manually finding proper place for the center.

Another problem I stumbled across is that some objects after being resized tend to change shape when pivoted. That can be solved by freezing selection.