Making a character with modern techniques

[tony-leicher]

Hello, I'm looking for an instructional book, DVD or tutorial that covers making a complete character starting from an empty scene. I have mostly modeled buildings, cars, spacships, and insect-like creatures that walk using IK and skeletons made mostly with NURBS.

I already have the Sybex book "Maya Character Animation - second edition" but it seems to loose me because the book shows you how to make a character using polys, NURBS, and SubD's and I don't know which to choose or why any one is better than the other, even though I hear good things about SubD's.

I just need an up-to-date tutorial-like book or guide that will show me from start to finish, using today's most widely accepted method available for Maya, for creating an animated human-like cartoon character (like in "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life") that has facial expressions that can be matched to a pre-recorded voice.

I currently use Maya 5 but if there are significant advances in later Maya versions that would make creating a character much quicker or simpler please let me know as I am willing to update my software if it will make my life easier.

Thanks, LORT

[joojaa]

THing is theres 3 different ways because theres many ways to approach the problem. And theres eaqualy many ways to slove problems. Its amuch a optimisation issue.

polys subdivs nurbs all have the same goal,a mndt atleast in maya workflow tehy are the same. Because the toolset is buildt to rely on general moduules that support functionality on all of theese.

Theres no best or optiumal way, just more widely accepted ways and less accepted. This does not mean soem is inferior.

I mean nurbs are gerat altough many seem to thin k subdivs are phasing them out. Neverteheless all the vaielabel nurbs tools are as valid today as they were years ago. Besides nurbs toolset compliments the poly one, and this compliments the subd one. So even if you work soley on sudiv modells when animating. Yous still probably use nurbs tools every now and then because tehy offer you a a better approach to a cterain problemset.

In teh end there are as many ways as theres users.

[tony-leicher]

So SubD's are phasing out NURBS as today's 'standard', right? OK, I know what polys and NURBS are and I know how to do simple models using each, but I've never used SubD's. I think I'd like to build a model using SubD's to get up on them and be 'current'. What would be my best venue for learning to build a character using specifically SubD's?

[joojaa]

No they arent. Many intermediary users just think they are.

Subds are yous interpolated polys.

[gtcable]

Personally I love Lightstorm's "Connect Poly Shape" Tool. It is very user friendly, there are video tutorials online, and it is FREE.

Get CPS Here

SubDs on complex characters can require a lot of computing muscle. I feel that with CPS you get a lot of the same advantages of a SubD but you're working with the final Poly. No tesselation needed.

[joojaa]

theres no need ofr cps maya ships with the exaxt same functionality.

Anyway subs arent any more havey then cps.

[onscreen]

joojaa (or anyone) - i guess I'm out of date or just missing a detail, what is the CPS function in Maya ?

Lort check out my site billstout.com for the tutorial on modeling hands.
It goes through making a hand starting with NURBS and ending with SubD's

I never liked NURBS much because I started with Lightwave which was a poly program fromt the beginning. So for me ots personal. But I have found that I can get a lot with them very quickly if I use them. Convert to Polys because that's where I'm most comfortable. Also I think that the better the poly model, the less I'll have to do in SubD.

As for replacing NURBS it depends on what your goal is. In industrial design NURBS are king. In Hollywood it seems like SubD models driven by low res poly proxy objects are the current fad.

So what you are modeling and why you are modeling should have some impacy on your choice of tool.

[ugh138]

QUOTE(lort @ 07/05/05, 05:13 PM)
Hello, I'm looking for an instructional book, DVD or tutorial that covers making a complete character starting from an empty scene.

Get the Making of Leon DVD Set from CGtoolkit www.cgtoolkit.com

Covers everything from scratch. Only thing is that it covers a Professional Production process, I don't think you're going to be making clay maquettes for High res CyberScans.

Everything else is great.

Oh, T-Splines are the Future

[mike-milo]

For what it's worth, I have found Jai-jin Choi's Maya Character Animation book Maya Character Animation to be extremely helpful in my understanding how to model, specifically in SubD's. A large percentage of his book focuses on model building in Sub D's. I suggest you get that.

Granted, as Jooja pointed out, there are three ways to do most everything in Maya, but this is one way and I found it to be a very easy way to get going in Sub D's.

I will say that ultimately, having started modeling in Sub-D's I have found Polys to be much easier to rig and Paint Weights with. I have also found that people that work at Pixar, Sony Imageworks and Disney all seem to frown on Character modeling with Sub D's. (I know a few of them)

SubD's can get pretty heady when trying to weight them because of their topology and I never really got the hang of weighting Sub D's. Polys on the other hand seem to just Weight themselves, I guess because they have less vertices.

[mike-milo]

Oh and BTW: I believe the "CPS function" being in Maya that Jooja is talking about is under Duplicate with the create instance option selected and with a negative 1 in the X box . No?

[joojaa]

No! Its the polygons -> smooth proxy 400) {this.resized=true; this.width=400; this.alt='Click here to open new window';}" onmouseover="if(this.resized) this.style.cursor='hand';" onclick="if(this.resized) {window.open('http://users.tkk.fi/~joojala2/highend/mayamenu.gif');}" />, its exactly the same as cps without the nice gui, lots of shotrcuts built into maya 6.5 and beyond for this (much faster to work with keyboard shortcuts then bui buttons, read the manual).