Maya Days 6-8

Day 6

[Figure 49]

The first thing that I did was begin to form the shape of the third and outermost extrusion on the jaw line - also extending the mouth so that it has a more lizard shape. At this point, the mouth actually goes around the jaw to the point that the ends of the mouth aren't visible in the front view - which isn't how it is in the photo [Figure 35]. So that needs improving. 

[Figure 50]

Once I realised the mouth needed altering, I moved the ends to fit the frame of the human face that was left behind - so that the curves all still looked natural. I then made the mouth more wavy like the cartoonish drawing to keep things accurate as motion capture and rotoscoping would. 

In [Figure 50], I also made a basic extrusion on the head to plan out the shape. 

Though I said I would work on the jaw first - I realised that I needed an extruded strip down the nose so that I could freeze it during sculpting the nose - so that the centre of the nose and lips don't lose their form when tweaking the eyes and lizard nostrils. 

[Figure 51]

I started to make the nose but just flattening it in to the correct shape meant that lots of vertexes overlapped in to the mesh. I ended up deleting the nostrils and following what I did on the human face to create the nostrils. 

EBI - the symmetry tool started to have some issues here, and so I completed one nostril and the other had become a mix of vertexes and incorrect extrusions. Luckily, my last save was before i had started on the nostrils - so i just quit and started again, manually doing each vertex so that it looked the same on both sides.  

I also added in the second layer of the jaw extrusion that acts as layering of the lizard skin, and joins the nose, jaw and forehead. I think this helps define the human features, a lot like hulk's mouth wrinkles. 

Day 7

[Figure 52]

I started to make the basic forms of the other two head extrusions on both sides, which was good to help plan the overhang around the ears. At this stage in the crashed model, I had kept the human ears fully intact on the model which had caused issues with crossing vertexes when I tried to create the overhang and indent the ears. I ended up deleting the entirety of the human ears - which left me with the original outline of the ear from the human face - which was great for making the indent and the long ear hole shape. 

[Figure 53]

In [Figure 53] I tried to flatten out the outer jaw extrusion so that it blended naturally in to the mouth. This saved me from more vertex problems. 

I also started creating the head overhang and making a better basic form for the extrusions - creating a more hammer-head-shark kind of look with a larger forehead. This will give a good flat surface area for the spikes. The overhang mostly needs rounding off underneath so that it doesn't look like curly hair looping behind the ear. 

[Figure 54]

Though making the basic human ear shape made making the ear hole easy, the ear hole of a reptile curves in the opposite direction to a humans. But this helped in smoothing out the curve between the jaw, ears and overhang to make it look more natural. 

[Figure 55]

Similar to the ears, the eyes also had a symmetrical issue to the point where the tear duct was an overlap of a lot of vertexes all stretching back in to the head. After a few hours of trying to fix it, I ultimately deleted the tear duct, created a single face with the 'fill hole' tool, and tried to copy the other eye vertex for vertex until the symmetry tool seemed to work on all of them. Some of the extrusion did go badly, but I ended up extruding outside in, one section at a time. Instead of extruding the whole eye and extruding again in layers. This also meant that the centre of the eye didn't get too lost, so I ended up improving from my original plan. 

EBI: I need to keep an eye on what I'm doing, on both sides. Symmetry cannot always help, and my face is clearly off centre somewhere now. I understand it works on the top and back of the head as well as the ears - but be careful with face.  

Day 8

[Figure 56]

I brought over the oval eye shape from the human head, which I had dragged to the side of the stage. I wanted to keep my oval eyes, as they're a main feature to my appearance. Especially since I am referencing what they did with the Hulk and keeping Mark Ruffalo's eyes - I wanted to maintain my own as much as possible. They did need sizing, and I also had to create a perfect circle in the centre whilst trying to keep the oval - which meant I had to rotate the 'sphere' and give the longer values to a different axis. With the pupil, I had less experience with. With every other part of this head so far, I could refer back to the method I used on the human head, in the tutorial. But because i hadn't done the irises and pupils - my plan was ultimately to try to maintain the roundness of the eye, because the human side profile refence shows the eye doesn't dip in. So I extruded the pupil and moved it in to the head to try and create the correct look, and I'm hoping a see through texture on the iris will help you to see the pupil depth. This may need editing. 

• Dinh, C. (2019) Making Of: How VFX Transforms Mark Ruffalo to Hulk in 'Avengers: Endgame'. Available at: https://www.marvel.com/articles/movies/how-vfx-transforms-mark-ruffalo-to-hulk-avengers-endgame (Accessed: 5 October 2020)

[Figure 57]

Looking at my bearded dragon reference [Figure 36], the spikes that cover the creature are actually in the shape of lots of little horns, getting larger towards the bottom of the jaw. In my drawing i just drew these as triangular spikes. As I kept the cartoony look of the mouth, I decided to keep it as spikes. This also made it better for time consumption, as by now I had already spent eight days on the modelling alone, without texturing or the original plan to move the mouth. I tried to add some depth, but on some parts of the head, the spikes looked flat no matter how many vertexes I moved.  I was hoping this would look more professional in smoothing. 

By around the point of creating the eyes, my sculpting tools started crashing Maya. I'm not sure if this was the file size (though it had only reached 1MB), or because a technician changed my graphics card settings so that I could get Harmony to work for 503 - which so far has caused crashing in Premiere 2020 because it's not compatible. Because of this crash, I couldn't use the pull tool to make better spikes. I also had to manually smooth down areas which took a lot of vertex moving. 

• [Figure 36]  Holt, K. (2019) [Instagram] 23, December. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/harry.lizard/v (Accessed on: 27th November 2020)

[Figure 58]

[Figure 59]

When I smoothed the head spikes [Figure 59], I liked the gill effect that it created, as it's very reptile like. However my project is about realism and accurate translations. In motion capture, some of the oldest work meant that one wrong translation in one machine to the next would cause a malfunction in all of the databases. (Polar Express). If I were to keep the gills, they would need rounding to fit the shape of the head better, as they are all in a straight line. When you look closer at the gills, they have a tiny remnant of the unsmoothed spikes just sticking out of them, [Figure 60] which looks slightly unprofessional. 

[Figure 60]

• Menache, A. (2011) Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation. Second edition. United States: Elsevier, Inc.
• The Polar Express (2004). Directed by R. Zemeckis [Film]. United States: Warner Bros. Pictures.

My issue with this is that I want to smooth the head like I did with the human one, but I will lose my spiked texture. 

The jaw under the ears looked a little blank, and it wasn't visible in my design because it's offset behind the front view of the jaw. So I decided to add a horn shape on each side. On Harry, he has one horn larger than the rest at the lowest point of his jaw, so I thought it would be a good place to put one. 

[Figure 61]

[Figure 62]

I think the smooth looks worse on the neck, as it completely removes everything that I did. The spikes do not come close to overlapping and creating layers like on any reptile I looked at, and the bottom edge is completely rounded. The neck just looks like a normal tube with some edges jutted out around it. However to fix this issue, I could easily separate the neck from the head and make this two separate planes, to keep the neck unsmoothed and the head smoothed. 

WHAT COMES NEXT?

• Figure out the spikes
• Make sure smoothing is good
• Colour?
• ATTEMPT texture without sculpting tools to show why this isn't working
• essay#
• evaluation