3D Potential and Limitations: 3D printing

3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing (AM), refers to various processes used to synthesize a three-dimensional object. In 3D printing, successive layers of material are formed under computer control to create an object.These objects can be of almost any shape or geometry, and are produced from a 3D model or other electronic data source. A 3D printer is a type of industrial robot.

Futurologists such as Jeremy Rifkin believe that 3D printing signals the beginning of a third industrial revolution,succeeding the production line assembly that dominated manufacturing starting in the late 19th century. Using the power of the Internet, it may eventually be possible to send a blueprint of any product to any place in the world to be replicated by a 3D printer with "elemental inks" capable of being combined into any material substance of any desired form.

3D printing in the term's original sense refers to processes that sequentially deposit material onto a powder bed with inkjet printer heads. More recently, the meaning of the term has expanded to encompass a wider variety of techniques such as extrusion and sintering-based processes. Technical standards generally use the term additive manufacturing for this broader sense.

3D printable models may be created with a computer aided design (CAD) package, via a 3D scanner or by a plain digital camera and photogrammetry software. 3D printed models created with CAD results in reduced errors and can be corrected before printing, allowing verification in the design of the object before it is printed.
The manual modeling process of preparing geometric data for 3D computer graphics is similar to plastic arts such as sculpting. 3D scanning is a process of collecting digital data on the shape and appearance of a real object, creating a digital model based on it.

Who would have thought that modern manufacturing could be done without a factory? Since the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing has been synonymous with factories, machine tools, production lines and economies of scale. So it is startling to think about manufacturing without tooling, assembly lines or supply chains. However, that is what is emerging as the future of 3D printing services takes hold.

3D printing has been around for decades, better known as additive manufacturing (building an object layer by layer). What’s new is that 3D printing has reached consumer-friendly price points and footprints, new materials and techniques are making new things possible, and the Internet is tying it all together. Technology has developed to the point where we are rethinking industry. The next industrial revolution is opening up manufacturing to the whole world – where everyone can participate in the process.

(3d Art)

 This democratization idea will not be much different than the journey computers had – from a few, big, centralized mainframes to something we now hold in our hands.At the same time, 3D printing, long used for rapid prototyping, is being applied in a number of industries today, including aerospace and defense, automotive and healthcare.

(3d printed organs)

 As accuracy has improved and the size of printed objects has increased, 3D printing services are being used to create such things as topographical models, lighter airplane parts, aerodynamic car bodies and custom prosthetic devices. In the future, it may be possible for the military to print replacement parts right on the battlefield instead of having to rely on limited spares and supply chains.

3D Potential and Limitations: Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of aesthetics which holds that when features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some observers. The "valley" refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of beings as subjects move toward a healthy, natural likeness described in a function of a subject's aesthetic acceptability. Examples can be found in the fields of robotics and 3D computer animation, among others.
A number of films that use computer-generated imagery to show characters have been described by reviewers as giving a feeling of revulsion or "creepiness" as a result of the characters looking too realistic.  Examples include:

According to roboticist Dario Floreano, the animated baby in Pixar's groundbreaking 1988 short film Tin Toy provoked negative audience reactions, which first led the film industry to take the concept of the uncanny valley seriously.

(the baby from Pixars Tin Toy, 1988)

The 2001 film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the first photorealistic computer-animated feature film, provoked negative reactions from some viewers due to its near-realistic yet imperfect visual depictions of human characters.The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw stated that while the film's animation is brilliant, the "solemnly realist human faces look shriekingly phoney precisely because they're almost there but not quite". Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers wrote of the film, "At first it's fun to watch the characters, but then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements".

(Characters from Fival Fantasy: Spirits Within, 2001)

Several reviewers of the 2004 animated film The Polar Express called its animation eerie.  CNN.com reviewer Paul Clinton wrote, "Those human characters in the film come across as downright... well, creepy.  So The Polar Express is at best disconcerting, and at worst, a wee bit horrifying."   The term "eerie" was used by reviewers Kurt Loder and Manohla Dargis,among others. Newsday reviewer John Anderson called the film's characters "creepy" and "dead-eyed", and wrote that "The Polar Express is a zombie train." Animation director Ward Jenkins wrote an online analysis describing how changes to the Polar Express characters' appearance, especially to their eyes and eyebrows, could have avoided what he considered a feeling of deadness in their faces.

(a screenshot from The Polar Express, 2004)

In a review of the 2007 animated film Beowulf, New York Times technology writer David Gallagher wrote that the film failed the uncanny valley test, stating that the film's villain, the monster Grendel, was "only slightly scarier" than the "closeups of our hero Beowulf’s face... allowing viewers to admire every hair in his 3-D digital stubble."

(Grendel from Beowulf, 2007)

Some reviewers of the 2009 film A Christmas Carol criticized its animation as being creepy. Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News said of the film, "The motion-capture does no favors to co-stars (Gary) Oldman, Colin Firth and Robin Wright Penn, since, as in 'Polar Express,' the animated eyes never seem to focus. And for all the photorealism, when characters get wiggly-limbed and bouncy as in standard Disney cartoons, it's off-putting". Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon.com wrote of the film, "In the center of the action is Jim Carrey -- or at least a dead-eyed, doll-like version of Carrey".

In the 2010 film The Last Airbender, the character Appa, the flying bison, has been called "uncanny".  Geekosystem's Susana Polo found the character "really quite creepy", noting "that prey animals (like bison) have eyes on the sides of their heads, and so moving them to the front without changing rest of the facial structure tips us right into the uncanny valley".

(Appa from the movie The Last Airbender, 2010)

The 2011 film Mars Needs Moms was widely criticized for being creepy and unnatural because of its style of animation. The film was the second biggest box office bomb in history, which may have been due in part to audience revulsion.(Mars Needs Moms was produced by Robert Zemeckis's production company, ImageMovers, which had previously produced The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol.)

By contrast, at least one film, the 2011 The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, was praised by reviewers for avoiding the uncanny valley despite its animated characters' realism.  Critic Dana Stevens wrote, "With the possible exception of the title character, the animated cast of Tintin narrowly escapes entrapment in the so-called 'uncanny valley.'" Wired Magazine editor Kevin Kelly wrote of the film, "we have passed beyond the uncanny valley into the plains of hyperreality

Character and Narrative: Animating

So I have finally started animating my bully! The first problem I have encountered was when importing my character into the stage, when moving it forward or back it kept shrinking. One of my peers suggested to check if I somehow locked some of the attributes or tied them together, since I had poor understand of how to check that, I ended up going through all of them and unlocking them. And luckily enough it worked. Then I learned how to set up the lighting and camera and how to manipulate the workplace and not get lost in it, for isntance confusing perspective mode and camera mode

(perspective mode)

(camera mode)

With all that set I started animating the character. What seemed really tedious to me was making a key frame for every seprate joint. For some reason I imgined that you can select the character make a keyframe, move it a bit and make another keyframe and Maya would figure everything else out. But appearantly it doesn't work that way, you have to keyframe ever joint seperatly. So to start off with I did a simple scene where the bully is loughing at the nerd, so all it required for the bully to do was to point a finger and move his shoulder a bit.
In render view I have noticed that some of the character were black and I fugured that the issue was the project was not set up properly. I was given a workspace but not the whole project. But that was not a diffcult fix, so I've set up the project and reatched all the texture to the characters.

 I asked Callum to help me with the render so it was consistent to what he has done with some other scenes, so we went through the shadows and lighting and adjusted it a bit more. After starting the batch render I was frustrated to find out that it was rendering the wrong camera angle, I had trouble figuring out why, but Callum noticed that there were keyframes set for the camera, so after deleting those and setting up the camera again all was good and I left it alone to render. Can't wait to draw some faces on that later!

Critique Session

So today we showed our animation test and asked for some feedback. So everyone seemed to like it and our peers said it looks really good. One suggestion we got was to try puttinga phone ringtone so it would be easier to understand that the character recieved a message, however we want to stick with boopidy boop idea where every time the characters get messages we voice it as *boopidy boop* and as the messages get more agressive, the tone of the messages changes as well. We asked if the 2d animation works with 3d and everyone agreed that it works really well. One thing as pointed out, that the aspect ratio seemed to change in the video. After the critique I looked into it and it was my mistake, because after exporting the edited image sequence from Flash I did not check the ratio, therefore some of the composition was cut off. As I could not find the Flash file I was scared I would have o reanimate it, but I came up with an easy fix on after effects. The part of the video missing was not moving so I just put up the whole image as a backround and fitted the cropped out video on it. No we are going to proceed with animating as Callum is going to deal with the animating and I have the whole post production. There a lot of work needed to be done, but we are trying to stay optimistic and hoping to get the animation done by the deadline.

Test Aimation

This week we focused on making the short peiece of animation look as finalised as possible for the crit session. Callum managed to render out a whole 6 seconds of animation and I took over with the post production. I also figured that the timing on the animatic needed a bit more work so I suggested to voice it, to see if it could give us a better feel of timing. We done some test recordings and decided to use the sounds we made for now, but I really want to re-record it later on. As for the faces, I've put up the rendered out images on Flash and drew the faces on frame by frame. To be honest it felt really good to animate in 2d again so I did not mind spending a bit more time on it and it looked good too!
Callum was happy with the 2d faces so we decided to stick with that way of animating them. Afterwards I have put everything together on After Effects and tried to play around with sounds as well. Felling really happy with the animation so far, can't wait to hear the feedback!!

Character and Narrative: backround characters

Regarding the last critique session Callum and I decided to include the paper cut out idea on the backround characters. At first I suggested we make them as 2d plains and put them up on maya, but Callum insisted we do the as 3d because it would look better. I raised a cocern that it might extend the rendering process so we decided to rty it out and see how it looked. Callum made the 3d mesh and I did the UV textures for them. When we put them into the scene they seemed to look really good, and I noticed that in one of the scenes with my character loughing at the whimp, the backround character would look really bad if it were in 2d, so we decided to stick with it. After some more research into facial expressions I decided to make every character diffrent not only in their faces but in shades of clothing and such, both Callum and I were happy with the way the backround character looked-

And this is how they look on the mesh-

Chracter and Narrative: painting weights

So I have finally moved onto painting weights on my character. I thought it was going to be diffucult, but appearantly once agan I was mistaken. Basically just picking up the paint weights tool and clicking on the verticies you can tell Maya how you want your mesh to be affected by the joints and their position, so it was just a matter of selecting every joint and corecting the amount of influence it has on certain parts of the mesh. For instance the fingers, since their joints ar so close together, after binding, moving one finger it moves some of the geometry on the other finger and it just looks untidy. So the paint weights tool just helps to clean that up.
After painting the weights on, I have done some of the final housekeeping and neating up the character, locking away some of the attributes and connecting everything to the master controller.
Finally my character is rigged and ready to bully everyone!

Character and Narrative: rigging aint no game yo

So I moved on from modelling to making the skeleton of the model. The process was pretty straight forward for me as we already went through it with the demo character. However my characters skeleton was a bit diffrent because it had a hunched back and no neck.

(skeleton of the bully character)

So the skleton part took no time at all. I moved on with making the controllers. As I followed the video tutorials I had the controls in no time. However orienting the joints and the controllers was a challenge for me, because I did not completely understand what I am doing and why. By this point I started mindlessly folowing the videos without really understanding them.

 

And that's not good because I had to redo all the orientations as they weren't done properly, mainly because at some point I have done something I shouldn't- freeze the transformations, so whenever I would orient something the joint would fly off. Bet the second time around it was all good

Then I moved on to setting the Hierarchy of the joints, which seemed not that difficult. To be fair the hierarchy part was pretty straight forward. The hand is the child of the forearm, the forearm is the child of elbow and so on. And the whole father of them all is the root control!!

(controller hierarchy)

And then came the dreaded connecting the mesh to the rig. When it came to that I lost the SDK handles for the legs for some reason. The leg controls just did not work. I figured there's not much I can do until the next session, so I went on doing the UV map. That was pretty easy, however the hands posed a bit of a challenge to cut up so I inserted a few edge loops to help.

 

(Character UV)

After I applied the UV texture the model just broke. It could not move and the more I tried moving it the more the UV moved from place but not the character. I had no clue what went wrong. I asked Matt and he pin pointed the mistake streight away. Appearantly you cannot add geometry after connecting the mesh to the rig, and that is what I did when I was cutting up the UV maps. But thank the Maya Gods it was an easy fix, I just needed to detach the mesh from the rig and reconnect ir again. After that everything worked fine, even the legs for some reason started working.

(Mesh connected to the rig)

 I felt really relieved that all my hard work with the rig did not go to waste! With high spirits I moved on to painting the weights.

Character and Narrative: model me like one of your french models

So decided to leave the demo character and proceed with my own, since I was not working alone on the project and we had a schedule to follow with my partner. So I started modelling the character. I started off with putting up some reference images, as I mentioned earlier I found them extremely useful.  Then making a cube and extruding on wards. I kept the geometry really simple and as Mat pointed out later, tried to avoid triangular faces, because they might cause problems. I skipped the forearm roll and the forearm as well. However, even though we were suggested during the interim crit to maybe cut off the legs, I decided to do them anyway because I wanted to learn how to do it and they weren't that complicated on my character anyway. But I did save a lot of time with not making the jaw or the eyes.

So far the bully is coming nicely into shape, and I have not encountered any problems with modeling. Actually I really enjoyed it.

Character and Narrative: spooky scary skeletons

Well not really spooky, but skeletons non the less. So we finally started making the joints for the mesh. It was actually really straight forward, just clicking and dragging and you have your joints really. But the one thing that was important to keep in mind was not to do it in perspective mode, because as soon as you turn the angle, you can see that the joint is actually all over the place.

So we did from the side and corrected the position of the joint from the front, and vice versa. We also made the hips dislocate joint

Its handy if your character wants to do Elvis sort of hip shaking, apparently.

Come to think of it Beyonce would be a better example

To be honest I don't know what I was so afraid of when we started doing 3d, I thought it was going to be absurdly difficult and would involve some kind of high difficulty mathematics and rocket science and maybe a medical degree, but apparently it is going really well so far and its really simple.I have not struggled with anything, and I was not tempted to destroy maya and the redo everything again.Although it is too early to say, let's see how this goes...

Character and Narrative: UV mapping

After successfully mirroring my character and finishing off the mesh I saved it and proceeded with doing the eyes and the jaw. Unfortunately Maya crashed without me backing up that work. I figured I will comeback to it later and proceeded with the UV mapping. So we were showed how to unfold our character and put it in Photoshop, draw some things on it and bring it back to Maya! Basically we opened up the UV texture editor, cut up the character and boom- all of it is magically done!

then just by going in shell mode re-arrange the parts and we have neat and tidy character UV map ready to go, the saving it as a jped and you're free to fool around with it in Photoshop. Then just assign it as a new material. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Modeling on Maya- keep calm and extrude

So since we were asked to model and animate a 3d character we started learning how to use the software, step by step the video tutorials we were provided with showed a few useful tools and really helped wrap our heads around the whole 3d world. So we started of with putting up reference images as 2 plains and start the modeling process. Throughout the whole process I realized how important it is to have good reference images so as not to get lost in the process and it just makes the whole sculpting thing easier when you don't wander about in perspective mode and end up making something that looks good only from one angle.

So we started from the pelvis of the character and just extruded the whole way up the shoulder. One problem I encountered during the extruding process was that I managed to make some of the geometry inside out, which can cause some problems later on, so I learned to watch out for that mistake.

While finishing up with the shoulder we were shown how to use the append to polygon tool which for some reason I found really fun. It just basically fills in face when you select the edges. Another thing I learned how to do was how to insert and delete an edge loop, as well as how to slide it. One important thing I took notice of was if you try to delete the edge loop just by pressing delete, the loop might disappear but it leaves a lot of unwanted vertices, so it is important to use the delete edge/vertex tool instead. Then we proceeded modeling the arm and the forearm roll (which I did not completely understand, but ended up just doing it anyway). The hand posed a bit of threat because it seemed complicated but it really was not. Just some more extruding and appending the polygons. Also while working with the hand we were introduced to the multi cut tool which helped with inserting a single edge on a face, it comes in handy when you need to make triangular faces or just inserting a single edge without the hassle of making a whole edge loop. Then we proceed with making the neck and the head, which essentially was the same process as the waste. Then we grabbed the remaining edges on the pelvis end kept extruding until we reached the foot. Then  it was just a matter or shaping and playing about with the vertices and finally (I found this extremely useful, because my character is really square and edgy) we inserted a final edge loop on the soul of the foot so as to give it an edge when its in smooth preview.

While following the guide I did not face any major problems with modeling on Maya. I actually really liked it, its a pretty simple process when you know what you're doing.