Storyboard/planing:
To start off this project, I began with a simple storyboard. I had at first planned to create a simple animation of different colored diamonds with just a simple camera animation as seen below:
But after further though and consideration, I decided to create something a little more complex. I had recently started watching a show called Steven Universe in which each of the main characters had their own gemstone which gave them each a unique power/weapon.
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| Each character has his/her own gem that this visible on their body sans steven whose is on his belly. |
Seeing as each character had a well known gemstone, I decide instead to make animation surrounding the characters in the show. I wanted to create a short animation about the character 4 main characters in the style of a new episode promo. With a solid idea in mind I set off into Maya to start modeling.
Execution:
Inspired by the videos I saw of diamonds various people had made in maya I hit the internet in search of help on how to create this wonderfully realistic looking diamonds creating in Maya. I had found a few result but only one helped the most as it provided a step by step tutorial on how model, texture and even light the diamonds in maya using mental ray. I have provide the link to the tutorial:
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| garnet & amethyst |
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| Garnet, amethyst, and yellow diamond |
Once I was done modeling and texturing, these 4 gems, I started to plan creating pearl. Modeling pearl was not so hard as it was simple polygon sphere that I simply widen a bit to give a oval shape. What became the real challenge was figuring out how to shade it so it looked like a realistic pearl.
I had originally tried using one of the mental ray shaders as they seemed to work so well for the diamonds but no matter how much I tweaked it, I was just not getting the results I wanted. The pearl either came out way to shiny or light pink color got completely washed out.
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| pearls come in different shapes but share the same opacity when it comes to tint and color |
I then decided to try some of the other non-mental ray shaders to see if those would work better. Lambert and phong didn't work as Lambert was too dull while phong was too shiny. Blinn, however, work perfectly and with a few adjustments I was able to get the pearl to look as close to the source as possible. At this point, I also made some minor adjustments to the lightning as well as it was just to harsh for the pearl shader.
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| All the gems finally done minus rose quartz not seen in the scene |
Once I had all the gems finally shaded and modeled, I turned my attention to creating the background. For the background I wanted to stay as true to the show as possible so I try to create an environment for my gems based on a real place in the Steven Universe world.
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| Rose's Armory, a training ground used by the characters in the show. I chose this for my location for the ominous and cold feel the place gives off |
The Armory, was a simple place to model. I used a cylinder for the platform in the middle which I squashed down and widened. Then I used various polygons to create the stairs followed by a simple plane beneath to act as the floor/water below the platform.
Once I was done modeling, I began once again texturing. I had originally wanted to make the platform marble as that is what it looked like it was made of in the picture but that didn't work out very well as I could not find a shader that I was happy with to work. It was at this point that I decided to use bump mapping as this seemed the easier method. I used bump mapping on both the platform and the plane adding a picture of rock and waves respectively to both models. After some tweaking in the settings of both textures I came up with something I was happy with and did the job quite well.
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| Halfway Done ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ |
Once I was done with the background, I turned to the final step before I started to animate: creating each character's weapon. Each character in the show has his/her own symbol/item which best represents them. Garnet has her glasses, amethyst has her whip, pearl has her projections, and steven has his bubble shield. Below I will explain how I modeled and textured each one of the items.
Garnet:
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| garnet with her iconic glasses |
Garnet's glasses was by far the easiest thing to figure out modeling compared to the other gems' items. For this item, I created 3 planes placed them together in the shape of glasses. Then I used the Multi-cut tool to cut out the shape seen above into the front facing plane on the glasses.
Once I was done modeling the glasses, I added a simple blinn texture with a soft pink color and brought the translucency up to make the glasses look like foggy glass. Once that was done I grouped them and placed them by the two garnet gems I had previously created.
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| Final Product with gems |
Amethyst:
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| Amethyst with her iconic whip |
Creating amethyst's whip was much harder feet then creating garnet's glasses and more compound modeling and texturing went into making the whip look realistic. First, I started with modeling, then I started worked on texturing. While up until this point texturing was the hardest part, for amethyst modeling her whip became the most challenging. For her whip, I used several CV curves which I extruded into pipes. I didn't really know how to accomplish this so consulted another tutorial:
Once I was done modeling, I worked on texturing the whip. Amethyst's whip looks like it's made of leather so I started looking around at good tutorials that could help me create realistic looking leather. I used the leather texture and followed some of the things in this tutorials to create the look of whip:
My Final Product can be seen below:
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| Pearl creating a projection of herself through her gem |
Creating Pearl's Projection was by far the most complex thing to figure out when doing this project. I wanted to be able to make her gem look as though it was projecting a real picture but I just could not figure out how. Eventually after extensive research I came across a modeling tool in Maya called volume primitive. With this one could create a primitive that resembled fog in their scene. I used a cone volume primitive for the part of the projection that connected the image and pearl.
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| An example of a cone volume primitive. Note the foggy appearance. |
Once I was done with this part, I began creating the actually projected image. I created a small sphere which I compacted into a disk and then then created an extra light in the scene. Then in the color settings I added an image map of what I wanted projected and moved the light so it was shining directly on the disk.
My final result was this:
Lighting/Camera & Animation:
After I was finally done modeling and texturing everything, I moved on to lighting the scene. I used a total of 4 lights in my scene, 3 point lights and one ambient light. Each light was set to different settings in order to achieve the parameters I wanted for the scene. Once lighting was done I moved on to finally animating the scene. I created a CV curve around my scene and then attached a camera with an aim onto the path creating a motion path.
I used a camera with an aim and used this tutorial to help me detach the aim from the camera so I could move around the scene alot easier.
This allowed me to move the camera and the aim as separate objects so I could move around the scene and around the objects I had in the scene at the same time.
Once I was done animating I was finally ready to render my scene and output my animation:
Final animation can be found here:
Extra Stuff:
Once I was done with my animation I brought the final render into imovie to construct my promo. I added music from the steven universe soundtrack along with sound effects a tiny part from the new episode promo for steven universe to the end. The promo can be viewed on youtube below:
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