HUGE NEWS | What I've been working on! (Patreon)

As I said before, If I'm silent for too long it usually means I'm working on something big and I just want to make a surprise when it's ready!
 
Some of you already know this but:
I'M LEARNING HOW TO USE "AUTODESK MAYA" FOR MY NEXT ANIMATIONS!

(Yeah... If you never worked with 3D related software, you probably don't know why this is such a big deal ^_^"  So let me explain!)

So far I used "Poser" for my animations.
Poser is fine for comics! It's easy and intuitive (and you don't need to know much on the "technical side")
However, it falls short when you try to do any complex animations with it. It's very limited, insanely slow, it has a ton of bugs, and it made my life absolutely MISERABLE every time I tried to finish an animation before! (Poser would come up with new problems every day and corrupt my animations! A complete nightmare!)

Maya on the other hand is a professional 3D software capable of doing pretty much everything! (Complex animations, destruction, special effects...)
Professional animators used Maya to make animated movies like "Avatar", "Ice Age", "Madagascar", "The Matrix" and many others...

But because Maya is the industry standard for animation, used by professionals (and it's so advanced) it also means it's a lot more complicated to use! and you need to learn A LOT OF STUFF before being able to do an animation with it. Especially if you're creating and rigging your characters with Maya and want to make a good looking animation with humans in it!

Depending on who you ask:
some people say it can take months (or even years apparently?) to learn everything you need to create good animations in Maya: Here's someone asking the same question Again, it depends a lot on what you're trying to achieve and who you ask!

As you can imagine, making the switch from Poser to Maya as fast as possible isn't easy. It's like spending your life building things with legos, and suddenly being hired to design and build a new real engine for a car.  (Yes, that's a decent analogy!) XD

 
Well, screw it! I've been wanting to do better and more complex animations that just can't be done with Poser! Besides, Poser has given me so many problems and delays that I've got to make the switch at some point!

FORTUNATELY I've been working with Maya for about 2 months making a lot of small experiments and a ton of research on it! (gosh, the endless possibilities just to create characters and all their different benefits!)
You have to make sure you know what you're doing first. Otherwise, if you try to make a real animation, without knowing what you're doing, you'll end up going back and repeating a lot of work! (and fixing problems!)

This month I got more serious with it (I feel like I'm finally ready to create my first character!) =P
and I'm just getting past the most difficult part of recreating a character (Opal) by rigging/skinning her model so she "comes to life" in Maya!

What is rigging/skinning?
It's basically creating bones for your character so you can move and animate it!
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HERE'S A SMALL GLIMPSE OF WHAT I'VE BEEN DOING:
I HOPE YOU CAN SEE THE GIF IMAGES! IF NOT, HERE'S A VIDEO VERSION:
https://youtu.be/LT4TiWZVawc 

GETTING A SKELETON READY TO ANIMATE IN MAYA:

SCULPTING SOME FINAL ADJUSTMENTS ON OPAL
BEFORE TRANSFERRING HER BODY TO MAYA:

CONNECTING OPAL'S BODY TO THE NEW SKELETON IN MAYA:
(The bones deform her body terribly, this is how 3D character development begins)

This happens because the bones don't really "know" what parts of the body each bone should deform, to them this is just "some shape" and they struggle to deform it the way you want. You have to specify what each individual bone does to the skin and how they should interact with each body part. 3D Characters aren't literally made of flesh you have to "recreate the laws of physics" yourself. 

FIXING ALL THE BONE DEFORMATIONS FOR A REALISTIC CHARACTER ANIMATION:
(One of the most time consuming things when creating a 3D character)

SCULPTING SOME ADVANCED BODY DEFORMATIONS FOR EVEN MORE DETAIL! =D

The GIFs above and the description is just a small glimpse of what goes into creating animations with Maya, I've been doing research and working on this for several weeks because I want to make better animations! ;)

AND THIS IS WHY I'VE BEEN SOOOOO BUSY!
I'M CRAMMING MONTHS OF LEARNING AND PRACTICE INTO AS LITTLE TIME AS POSSIBLE! ^_^"

I hope you understand!

It's not easy to explain 3D related stuff to people that aren't familiar with it (and don't know how much work and time goes into it!) but I hope this small explanation made at least some sense to you, and you can understand why it's taking me some time to get a new animation ready!
I'm doing this because in the long run I'll be able to make better animations that just weren't possible with Poser, and I think we can all agree that this is a good thing! (It just takes some time!)  But like I said, I'm just getting past the more complicated part! ;) (Rigging a character!) And that's great news!
I'll try to keep you more updated on my progress for the next few days!

Oh! And I hope you liked this "presentation" ;P