For our second project we have been assigned the task of rigging a pair of legs, we have been given some very basic legs to rig by Mark. We have also been required to perform some basic animation to show that the rig works correctly.
To begin with I opened up the obj.file and placed the basic legs into the world of Maya, they had already been placed into the centre so no need to edit there position. To start creating the joints that make the leg I needed to be in a far better veiw so I changed perspective into the side veiw, this allowed me to get the correct position of the joints starting with the hip, knee, ankle, ball and finally the toe.
After I had placed the joints in the correct place it was time to check the joints were perfoming the correct movements and moving in right axis, this is mainly for the knee joint, otherwise the knee would flex backwards instead of forwards. When I was happy with this i ment into joint hierachy chart and named all the joints e.g. Hip_L etc. This way when it came to copying the leg I could easliy create it just by searching the existing joints.
After I had ensured that this was correct it was time to copy the skeleton for the second leg, by achieving this you just select the joints and mirror them in the skeleton menu but making sure to change the axis, also because I had named them well and had it all sorted out I could just search to copy the joints as I explained earlier.
Once the left leg had been copied it was time to bind the skin to the skeleton. This will then make the skeleton part of the skin and have an effect on the mesh when it moves making it look like a pair of real legs. I also had to add a basic tip of the spine to connect the hips.
The last part to sort out was the IK handles and reverse footlock. These tools will help create the correct movements later on when I go to animate the legs. To create the handles you need to connect the IK handles to the ankle from the hip, this makes the knee bend in the correct way.
For our contextual studies project we have been asigned the topic of researching something either to do with representation or space in games. To start with I looked at war in video games and how morality was shown in these games but instead I just picking a game genre I widened my search up and changed it to violence in video games.
I wanted to look at violence in video games because almost all the top selling games are either first person shooters or some sort of violence shown in a game, examples are games such like; the Call of Duty series, Grand Theft Auto series, Gears of War, Killzone, Mortal Kombat and many others.
I was intrested to know why video games get critized and blammed by the media for all the violence caused in the modern world today. I learnt that other than games getting the blame for violence films, music, books and comics were once blamed for there content but as fims got filtered and had age certificates so young children were unable to see them in cinema. But games now get the blame into the modern violence because games are becoming far more popular as the game world is largely increasing, games are also being acused more freaquently as games actually emerce you in the world and your decsions to kill someone or not is the players choice.
Further looking into my research I learnt about how many researchers have looked into violence in games and how they effect young people. I looked at Lt. Col. David Grossman who had written a book about how game companies are hardening up children in the ways of war to make them not feel emotion, he also believes that video games are teaching children how to understand and use weapons in the method of killing. As I looked further into his book and I found an example of 14 year old Michael Carneal who got hold of a gun and open fired on a small prayer group and he hit every member of that group in the upper torso or head. After reading this it reminded me of watching the 1999 Columbine shooting in america and how 2 best freinds went on a rampage at there school killing 12 students and a teacher aswell as injuring 23 other students, after the blood shed they both committed suicide.
In the psychoanalytic theory (Ellis. 2002) sexuality and aggression are two drives. Both are used for releasing what may happen in the reality or fantasy. Therapeutic ideas according to the ‘Symbolic Catharsis Hypothesis’ form the basis of the ‘Hydraulic model anger model’ (Bushman. 2002.) this model suggests that frustration leads to anger and eventually that anger will build up inside an individual like “hydraulic pressure inside a closed environment” until it is realised some way. This is suggesting that if people do not their anger out, but instead keep it bottled up inside it will cause them to explode in an aggressive rage.
This idea was carried out by Feshbach (1955), who investigated the impact of exposure to television violence on aggression. According to his research violence in video games would allow the player to engage in fantasy aggression, therefore discharging their hostility in a satisfactory way, it will also help reduce the need to carry out aggression in a behaviour realm.
Looking into further arguments about violence in video games an article came up before the debate in California between Schwarzenegger and the EMA (about banning the sale or rental of certain “violent” video games.) and it was arguing the fact if violent video games should be banned, why not ban violent theme park attractions? (Adam Theirer. 2010) He talks about how all the games you see on the shelves are influenced by books such as ‘The Lord of The Rings’ and ‘The Godfather’ was inspired by Mario Puzo’s novel.
Adam also makes a bold comment about how video games are now inspiring movies, books, music and comics, for example ‘Prince of Persia,’ ‘Max Payne,’ ‘Resident Evil,’ ‘Tomb Raider,’ ‘Doom,’ ‘Halo’ and ‘Gears of War.’ This of course means that all the characters and stories you see and read in books, comics and films have been all inspired by video games.
This must mean then that if the games get selected under the new law of banning certain violent games then surely comics and films will have to go under this law as they all are influenced by each other. But then that will also mean that theme park attractions will have to be changed as they will contain the inappropriate amount of violence. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attraction Terminator 2 3D will have to be cancelled with its real life cybernetic robots shooting and violence shown a screen.
However children love the attractions when I went to Universal studios I remember how much myself and my brother loved the idea of fighting each other as terminators, children love the idea of being emerged into a sense of thrill and action, just because children are shown something violent doesn’t mean that they will necessarily be violent.
For this terms unit 1 project we have been giving the challenge of designing and creating a door from scratch in Maya. This would be a interesting project for me as I am not comfortable using 3D programs as we had the choice in our last project of animation, using Maya or Photoshop and I chose to use Photoshop because I couldn't fully get my head around the tools and the complexity of the software. But neither the less I will try and learn how to UV map, re-topology and prepare it for a basic game engine.
To start this project of I will begin by coming up with some initial concept sketches as I will not need a fully detailed drawing to show the shape and structure of the door. All of my thumbnails will be basic and shouldn't take me more than 2 minutes, to create this thumbnails I have downloaded the free software Alchemy, this software allows you to draw very basic shapes and lines to create quick designs or you can use it to create full detailed drawings.
Once I had finished these designs I selected one of them and edited it in Photoshop so that it was of a higher and suitable quality then I opened it into Maya as a layer at the back of the virtual world. After it was placed in the correct place I lowed the opacity, this would allow me to see my drawing and allow me to place blocks in ruffly the correct place allowing me to edit them and distort them.
Firstly I began with creating a back wall for where the door will be placed and added other segments on the wall to help with detail later on in the design. After I was happy with that I added some front and sides that stuck out to give the door some depth, I designed the door randomly with no sense of idea if im honest but somehow I was kinda influenced by old Japanese archways.
After I had placed the door in the correct place I had added an basic archway with a front wall. This was inspired from the film 'Masters of the Universe' as the main bad guy sits on a thrown of spikes. I also wanted to make my door different instead of the typical sliding open door or an old medieval castle door way. Once I had finished creating the top half of the door I felt something was still missing so I added a stair way to make the door seem more mysterious.
Once I had my model made from the design reference and I was fully satasfied with how it looked I then began to map out the UV's individually selecting all the faces and sides and scaling them down to a good enough size for the correct amount of detail in the maps, so the doors and the arcs where the biggest taking up the most space inside the editor box, whilst the sides and top parts of the walls were scalled down as there would hardly be any detail shown on them.
When I was happy with how I had layed out my maps this was saved as an obj.file then opened into the sculpting program mudbox so that I could add textures to the layers giving it some better looking appearence instead of a simple map over the top of plan sides. Also in mudbox you can project a texture image ontop of the image to give it the 3D look aswell as the in depth detail that you can't get just from panting. I found this far more easily than painting everything individually.
Once I had completed my textures I began the painful process of creating the individual maps this would allow me to add my texture mapping into maya and wrap it around my obj.file. This should of been a simple process but I found it a very long and dwelling challenge to sort out, however it worked and I was left with a complete door.
