Toothy's World

Using textures and a NURBS plane, I made Toothy's universe a little more interesting.  I used a mountain and rock texture for the base of the city, and downloaded textures from the internet to add to the buildings and background.  

Toothy's Universe

Original Glass Building texture

Glass building texture recolored

I downloaded a glass building texture and decided it wasn't dark enough for the scenario, so I adjusted the hue/saturation, levels, and color balance in Photoshop.

Space background courtesy of Google

The story takes place on a floating city drifting in space in some other galaxy or universe, so I decided to add a galactic touch to the environment rather than the pitch black backdrop I had originally intended.  My biggest fear in using it was having the background and the glow from the space backdrop overcast the actual world, so I opted to use dull lighting to de-emphasize it.  The dull lighting also helps in creating the dismal feeling of the universe it's supposed to convey.

Working on the universe

 As can be seen, I manipulated the control vertexes of the plane to encompass the little city in order for the camera to move throughout the world better.

The final Toothy (though far from being perfectly rigged) was loaded into the project and left at the origin while I manipulated the world around him.

Toothy on top of the world

Toothy's Fall: Toothy Reboot

The first model of the character ended up a disaster: the skeleton was incapable of translating without leaving the skin and having the eyes fall out of Toothy's head.  Initially, Toothy's eyes were attached to his skeleton, so I had to go back to his basic shell and rebuild his eyes and skeleton.

The New Toothy

The new Toothy had locators added to make his eyes move, as did the old one, but this time they were correctly oriented.  However, moving his eyes and moving Toothy still remained a problem, but this time when I move Toothy's character, his eyes stay in his head as long as I don't change the position of the locators.  At the origin, the locators can be moved and Toothy's eyes will revolve in his head like actual eyes.

The new Toothy is closer to the original look I had intended for him.  Before the raised lower lid gave him a happy-go-lucky kind of attitude in appearance - which was adorable - but not exactly as well suited to his character as it would have been for Bert's.  I do wish that I could have expanded on his look a bit more, but I was too wrapped up in trying to make the eyes work that I left little time for tweaking the appearance.

The eyeball, pupil, and eyelids are made from NURBS spheres.

Working on the new eyes: using the E NURBS curve as an aim constraint (E for eye)

Building the eyes tutorial

A 10 second clip of the new Toothy:

On a side note, I attempted to build some of the character of Bert, but this was as far as I got

Bert's body

Toothy's Character Model: Work in Progress

Toothy

Beginning Toothy: using a NURBS sphere for his body and legs and a revolved curve for his arms.  The curve is highlighted in green.

Toothy with his two arms - copied and pasted NURBS curves adjusted to fit into his body

Toothy in his near complete form but without his tooth.  Color: lambert; R: 0.284, G: 0.155, B: 0.400

Making Toothy was much harder than I had anticipated and took a total of about 16 hours, mostly because I kept confusing myself, or the program would crash before I had a chance to save the newest additions and changes.  The time may have also taken longer because I attempted to make him on my own.  When it came to building and adding his skeleton, I finally consulted Learning Maya 6's lesson on building Salty.

I began by sculpting his body from a NURBS sphere, adding sections to give it more dimension.  When I was satisfied with his body and legs, I used a revolved curve to create his arms.  The curve gave me a better shape and more freedom than if I had used a primitive.  After deleting the history and grouping his body parts together, I had my Toothy.

Creating Toothy's skeleton

 
I could not figure out how to give Toothy a mouth, and decided to leave it out as he never really says anything or expresses himself with it during the story.  Toothy's tooth was made from a NURBS primitive cone that had been shaped and added to his model.

Toothy's skeleton has 16 joints and is rooted in the middle.

As of now, Toothy's eyes are rooted to his skeleton, and so moving him and all his components anywhere else but the origin is impossible.  Despite that, the following video has been made with a few of his actions:

Using three spotlights, a camera with aim on a motion path.  In order to attach the camera, I had to un-check the "follow" in the attach motion path options.

"Toothy's Fall" Character Art

"Toothy's Fall" is a short story about two monsters living on some city floating in space on a chunk of world.  The main character Toothy is a monster with a sharp tooth that juts out of his mouth (hence his nickname).  His tall friend Bert is the character that accidentally drops him off the building.

The original sketches of the story with two additional characters that do not make an appearance in the storyline (they have been X'd out).  This includes the floating city and the two characters, Toothy and Bert.

This is the model of Toothy and the front model of Bert taken from the original sketches with color swatches of what they will be.

Midterm Project: Toothy's Fall

A storyboard for a story I was hoping to complete soon.


To summarize, Toothy is a small monster living on some isolated floating city-planet.  He finds himself on top of a building on his planet and marvels at the height it is before his tall friend Bert appears, approaches him from behind, and, in his elation to see him, accidentally drops him off the building.

The scene starts with a far shot of the setting of our story: a floating city in space.  It then zooms in to the rooftop of one of the buildings where a small, purple monster (Toothy) is standing.  As we watch him, Toothy stands there, shifting his eyes and blinking.  He has forgotten where he is.  He then walks up to the edge of the building.  As he's moving forward, the camera revolves around him to look over his shoulder and down the edge of the building (what Toothy sees).  It's very far down.  Toothy's eyes bulge at the height he is at, and he slowly starts to back away.  As he's backing up, a trap door behind him pops up.  The view switches to see who comes out of the back door: a top of a head that reveals itself to be a tall, yellow monster: Bert.  Bert blinks after popping his head out of the trapdoor.  He smiles when he sees his friend Toothy.  The view switches behind the two monsters as Bert approaches Toothy, still backing up.  The view then cuts to the fronts of the characters.  Toothy wipes invisible sweat off his forehead ("Phew!") and Bert is still walking towards Toothy.  He raises his arms and a big smile forms on his face.  Bert grabs Toothy in a big hug (Toothy squishes in the grip) and Bert spins him around.  As he's spinning he walks towards the edge of the building and lets Toothy go.  Toothy drops off the building, out of our sight, and Bert looks down ("Oops.")

There will be no voices throughout the scene; everything (such as "phew!" and "oops") will be expressed through the actions of Toothy and Bert.

Note: The names of the characters will never be said or revealed through the video, but for storytelling purposes, I have included both their names.

The following is a video of the rough draft of half the camera effects I would like to utilize in the video, although badly timed and incomplete.  The characters are absent, but it introduces the setting of their antics

Bouncing Ball

Screenshots print screened and saved as JPEGs of my bouncing ball project.  The first is frame 1, 30, and 42, respectively.

Floating City

A snapshot of my floating city colored and with some temporary lighting.

Lamp Curves Model

This is the model of the lamp I made out of curves.

NURBS Assignment #1

For the first assignment, I attempted to build a sort of floating city out of NURBS primitives.

The base of the building is an upside down cone that I added more dimension too and shaped in an attempt to give it a mountainous texture, and as if it had been ripped off a planet.  The buildings were simple cubes made in varying sizes.