Final Project

The Chosen Dialogue

Group Final Video

For our final project, we chose a dialogue from the comedy show that we both loved. It is a short scene in the TV show 'How I Met Your Mother'. The scene is about the a man called Ted is admiring a lady sitting at the bar and whispered to his friend, Barney. Barney loves to look at chicks and when Ted told him about the girl, without waiting any longer, he turned to look at the girl but Ted does not allow him too and Barney did the 'pity face'. He turned slowly for the first few seconds then complete his turn aggresively.

We chose the scene because we find it interesting, cute, funny and also they uses many different expressions like smiling, pity face, angry and shocked. Since the dialogue has the word 'bar', we decided to model out a bar environment that suits the dialogue and also the characters. We also added an effect using Adobe Premiere Pro in the middle of the scene whereby Barney showed a pity face when Ted ask him not to look at the girl. The reason why we added this is to show the main focus that is the eyes, how Barney got Ted to let him look at the girl with his cute pity face.

We encountered few problems with the referencing but my partner, Dawn, managed to get it woking. We had to reference our characters, the chair and also the bottle to the main 'Bar' maya file. This projects taught me many things, how we see a character behaves in the particular scene, the facial expression and the movements. We also used what we learnt from IN3D project 2, the constraints for the hands and bottle. It was not easy at first because we were not used to it but after awhile, we got the hang of it and actually, it was quite fun.

With the knowledge that I've gained for the past 1 year, it makes me appreciate the animation movies more. The two videos below is a short scene from 'Happy Feet 2' I admire the intricate animation of the krills and all the tiny details. The movie was really good too but I focused more on the aniamtion. It was superb! In my opinion, it was the best animation movie! You should watch it!

Individual Final Video(with Facial Expressions)

This is the complete animation of my part, I had to do the character, Ted Mosby. After I did the blockings, I find it easier to animate the character, I added the facial expressions and smoothen out some parts of the movements. I did not need to do many editing for the final as I did mostly for the blockings.

Individual Blocking

Blocking with settings

The storyboard and the key poses are very important because it is easier to animate the different movements. The blockings were much hard because the hands always pass through the table which was very frustrating.

Project Storyboard (Nadiah and Dawn)

This is my storyboard. I did on Ted Mosby. The reason why me and my partner has the different storyboard is because we focused on our character. All the key poses are in the sitting position so only the upper body moves.

Week 4 - Exercise 5(Questions and Answers)

Answer the following questions:

1. Imagine you are creating a scene where a car drives along a straight road, but swerves around at random as if the driver is drunk.Do you think it would be useful to know how to program using MEL when creating this scene? Explain.

Answer:
In my opinion, MEL scripting is only able to create a normal random swerving, just like the human in the Zombie exercise but it is not the best choice as we are not able to create any effects like breaking at some point. It is better to do it on the stage itself so that you can manually adjust the animation.

2. For drunken car scene, give TWO advantages and disadvantages (pros and cons) of using scripting to create the swerving car animation.

Answer:

Advantages:

• The first advantage of using scripting for the scene is that I am able to get the basic swerving of the car at random and I do not have to waste time to animate it slowly. It saves time.
• The second advantage is that, with MEL scripting, I am able to do a control panel to adjust the speed of the car. I do not have to confuse myself and use keyframes.

Disadvantages:

• The first disadvantage is that I may not get the effects that I want with MEL scripting. For example a sudden jerk and when it jerks, the car boot will open a little to show the impact of the jerk. I will still need to do it manually.
• The second disadvantage is that the animation will go on forever until I press the stop button. It will not be easy if I want to add in other scenes.

3. You might think that programming using MEL is similar to using ALICE(in year 1). It is actually very different. Explain TWO of the main differences, as far as you can tell.

Answer:

Differences:

• Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming while MEL is an advance scripting.

• Scripting languages like MEL scripting are languages that allow you to send commands directly to a system that executes these commands. These commands are read line by line and executed. An error is issued when a line cannot be executed for any reason. Programming languages that are used in ALICE are languages that allow you to create a program by writing structured code that is read all at once by the system, checked for errors, and translated into an unreadable format that the machine can then execute. In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#.
  

Week 4 - Exercise 4 (Control Curves)

P.S. Click on the images to zoom in because the images below are small and not clear

Arrow

Locator

Bulb

Cube

Cross

I have to put the cometScripts.zip folder in Maya script folder and open Maya script editor. In the script editor, I have to load the cometMenu.mel source script and in key "cometMenu;" in the box below. The tool will appear on the bar on top of the screen and now the controls can be created! :)

These are some scripts that are taken online and after attempted this exercise, I was amazed of what MEL scripting really can do. There are different methods of how to use MEL scripting and it is fun to try some the different methods. In this exercise, I was taught how to use MEL to create control curves. It was actually an easy activity, I must say. Only that the MEL files have to be in the correct Maya script file. If not, the files cannot cannot be found in Maya.

Week 4 - Exercise 3(Zombies in random)

I added a new button named 'Random' and change the title of the control panel to 'Zombie Maker'. I also created a new procedure called the 'zacp_random()'. In the 'zacp_random()', I copied the previous codes and edited the codes only for the zombies. I created a variable and set it to random between 1 to 50. I also created a 'text' and the 'random_number_generated' that will generate when the 'Random' button is pressed in the control panel. The random button will not only be generated at the control panel, it will change the number of zombies on the stage.

In this exercise, I learnt how to do the codes in Maya. It was like a test as I have to understand the codes and try it on my own. From what I understand, MEL scripting uses ActionScript which is quite familiar for us now so it was not much of a problem. This exercise is very helpful if I need to create many objects on stage.

Reference: http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2012/en_us/index.html

Week 4 - Exercise 2(Zombie Apocalypse Scene using MEL)

Part 1

On the first video, I was taught how to let the human walked continuously and of random X and Z axis. I also learned how create boundaries. From the first video, I can say that I've learnt quite a lot. The part that makes the human walk continuously is very useful. I will definitely use this in future.

Part 2

In part 2, I learnt how I can use the human and duplicate special and turn it into a zombie. It is not as tedious as it seem. I need to only duplicate special, remove the human and replace it with a zombie so that it is clearer to see which is the zombie and human. Since zombie walks slower, I change the zombie's speed.

Part 2 - Zoom in on Zombie

This is the zoom in of the zombie and as you can see that it walks slower than the normal human. And it also looks uglier.

Part 3

In part 3, the tutorial taught me how to create more than one zombie and human and all of them doing the same actions.

Part 4

In the previous part, whenever the humans walks beside nothing happen. That was not supposed to happen. The humans should turn into zombies whenever they are near to them. In this part, I learnt how to set the distance so that the human will change to zombie at a certain distance.

Part 5

The 5th path, there were 2 types of human, the one that walks naturally and another was the one that will look scared when he gets near to the zombie. I had to set the distance between the zombies and the human and when it gets near, the action will change. This is interesting as I am able to use 2 different humans and replace each other. I do not have to animate and each one of the humans.


Part 6- Control Panel
The last part of the tutorial does not need a playblast because it only taught me how to create a control panel to control the amount of zombies and humans that I want to add on stage. I do not need to create thousands of group to add them to stage.

Week 4 - Exercise 1 (Scripting in Maya)

Lesson 1 - Commands in MEL

Lesson 2 - Saving scripts to the Shelf

Lesson 3 - Using variables in MEL

Lesson 4 - user interface creation and procedures



This is the first time doing Mel scripting and it is amazingly awesome! I can add anything on the stage just by scripting. I do not need to add it on my own. It is very handy for animators as it makes their job easier. I am also able to add gravity to the barrels which makes the barrels look more realistic. This exercise is very useful and I would want to do more scripting in the future.