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.

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.