I spent a few hours fine-tuning the textures on the fish and adding eyeballs.

Afterwards I worked on putting bones inside the fish and binding the skin to the bones so it could move.

My instructor pointed out that although I had done a lot of experimentation and learning, my hospital scene had gotten pretty far away from my original storyboard idea, and I needed to simplify. With that in mind, I worked on getting the figure from a standing pose to a lotus (cross-legged) pose. This was difficult at first, because I could not figure out how to get his knees to bend and lower properly.

To select the knee area of the body, I had to right-click on that joint and choose “HK Mode Body Part” from the menu. That allowed me to select an individual body part and move it. I was able to get the knees, elbows and hands into position.

Because the Bones of the skeleton cause some strange deformations of the skin, you have to know how to “Paint Weights” for the skin to direct how much influence the bones have over the skin. This seems more art than science at this point; I am still struggling.

Paint weights on the should don’t look too bad.

The leg and hips area need a lot more work. The bones in the hips are causing a strange deformation of the skin around the belly.

The next thing I wanted to do was change the background into something serene and beautiful yet not distracting. I found a tutorial on Youtube describing how to apply a movie as a texture, and I selected a motion graphic of clouds. I used Adobe Media Encoder to convert it to an AVI file. I followed the directions in the tutorial, but in my Playblast animation, the background does not animate, so I will need some help with this.

Below is the playblast with the IV coming down from the bag. Also, I will remove the floor in the final scene. I simply forgot!

The second scene is a close-up of the cells moving through the vein.

I need to fix the seam inside the vein which looks too abrubt, and I think I may need to add additional objects to represent the chemo medicine flowing into the vein as well.

It took a lot of trial and error, but I finally figured out how to set keys and do my first animation with the human figure. In this scene, the figure sits in a chair and the IV tube comes down toward the arm.

Nex

Here is another animatic after I added some lighting. I used an ambient light behind the figure near the doorway, and a diffuse spotlight directly in front and slightly overhead. I wanted it to look like a clean, white, sterile environment. The shadows give it an edge of tension to empathize with the tense feelings of the patient.

Next I created a curve that I wanted the camera to follow around the room. I was inspired to make a curve similar to the “golden ratio.”

I adjusted the height of the beginning and end points, so that the camera would go up and down as well as around the curve.

You can see from the animatic that it needs some tweaking, but this helped me understand the general theory.

The figure will need some correcting due to the skin deformation that occured when the bones were rigged. I will need to do more research/get help on understanding how to correct with paint weights.

I began adding some walls, furniture and textures to the hospital room. Overall I think I need to work on the textures more; I’m not sure about the transparent wall but I wanted to experiment with something just to see how it looked.

Here is a close-up of the IV drip bag.

When you get close up to the figure, you can seen some deformation of the skin that was caused when the rigged “bones” (used for animation) were attached inside the skin. This deformation will need to be corrected using paint weights or other techniques. (Need more help/research here.)

Next I created a camera and constrained it to a motion path. You can tell from the animatic that the path needs some tweaking, but this first attempt helped me understand the theory. Now I can go in and refine my curved path that the camera is attached to.

For this scene, it will be a close-up of the blood vessels flowing through the vein.

This was done with a simple Pipe polygon. I did the UV unwrapping first while it was still a straight pipe (much simpler that way) then I used the rotate and scale tool to shape it into a more organic shape. I wanted the open end to be exaggerated, so I scaled it up.

Lastly I used a sphere which I scaled down into a “squished” shape, then pulled vertices down to make it even more concave. The Paint Selection tool worked great for selecting just the vertices I wanted, and Soft Selection gave it a softer shape when I pushed them down into a concave shape.

Overall this scene came together very quickly.

I had a lot of trouble with the UVs on my first fish; apparently I had two identical copies of the fish occupying the same space and time. I tried for a while to figure out how to correct this, but in the end decided that I wasn’t really that happy with the box modeling of that fish – it seemed too square and blocky, so I wondered what it would be like to model a whole new fish using a cylinder instead.

I was much happier with this version of the fish, which took me about two hours to complete. I proceeded to unwrap it in Maya, with a lot of trial and error. I eventually got a UV “skin” that seemed to work, and began painting a texture in Photoshop. As you can see it still has a ways to go, but I was pretty excited to get this far. Some of my fins are facing the wrong way, but this gives me a good idea of where to go next. The hardest part will be getting a realistic texture, considering all the scales and colors, but this is my prototype for now.

I began working on the mandala disc.

Here is the scene with the fish, lily pads, lotus and mandala all together.