Our first task for our Maya tutorials after becoming quite comfortable with the rigged character given to us, was to pick five of the 25 emotions listed and use that character to portray these emotions as best as possible. However we were not supposed to go into Maya and pose the character straight away, we were to get references of ourselves and work from them, to get used to having something to refer to!
The first emotion I decided to choose was timidity, because I feel like this emotion best relates to me, and is especially how I felt when we were told to take pictures of ourselves for this task. I really enjoyed posing the model in Maya for this emotion because it is a much more introverted emotion, and therefore unlike the first lesson where we got to experiment with this model, I opted to do the opposite of arms wide open and over dramatic. But I definitely think you can tell my model is shy, which is what I was hoping to achieve.
I also started to have a go at playing with the lighting in Maya as I have never done it before. I tried to go for a less harsh lighting because timidity is an emotion that shies away from being the centre of attention, so I like how the scene is lowly lit and quite soft. I then experimented with cinematography, and tried to capture my model at different angles to emphasise the quiet emotion.
The next emotion I chose was 'bravado' because it the complete opposite of timidity and I thought it would be interesting to model a character completely opposite to my nature. I really loved testing out the lighting for this emotion as I did a spotlight directly above the model and I feel like it highlighted the bold, almost cocky facial expression which I am impressed with. As well as focusing on the posture of my model (strong straight back), I also payed a lot of attention to its arms and legs. I feel like having one foot stuck out and one on its toes makes the model look like it is mid action on a centre stage, and this is probably my favourite pose of the five that I did.
I then wanted to test out even more drama, and went for the 'fear' emotion. Again, I really like this pose because it is so overly dramatic and I think it looks a lot better than my reference photo. I also think practising the composition of the shots that I took allowed me to make my model look even more scared, for example positioning the camera low down in the scene and looking up at the character. As well as the pose, I think the lighting has a lot to do with how frightened my model looks, I did another spotlight, but harsh this time and changing the colour of it to yellow, and positioned it very close to my model in order to create the effect that the thing that my model is afraid of is right in front of it. I also love that the eyes of my character is looking directly into the light, so you can really see the whites of his eyes, increasing his fear.
I then went to the other side of the spectrum and posed my model with 'happiness'. This was really hard for me to take a reference photo for, because I didn't know whether to face forwards, backwards or sideways and it was also a difficulty to get my head in the shot. However I still had a reference to refer back to and in the end I like how model is posed. This time I focused on really bending the models back and flicking the toes out, as well as the facial expression, so that every inch of my model oozed happiness. You can really tell when someone is happy when they have a big smile on their face, so this is something I tried to highlight. I also loved playing with the camera in this one, turning it upside down (middle picture in above) and tried to emulate a soft, joyous lighting.
The last emotion I chose was anticipation, as this is one of the 12 principles in animation and just in general is a great way to intrigue an audience. So for this pose I wanted my model to be anticipated in the sense that he was very eager to listen to something over to his right. And since I really liked the effect of the yellow lighting in the 'fear' I used it again in this scene to imitate the point of interest, or in this case anticipation. I had a great difficulty trying to separate my models legs like mine in the reference photo, so I did try and bend my model over a bit more to the right to substitute this. I also focused on the models arms quite a bit and in the end I was happy with the result.
Overall I felt like this task was very fun, but in the beginning it was certainly challenging. This was because I am still not used to the software yet, and I also didn't know quite how to add lighting without it being extremely washed out (sun and sky setting). But the more I practised and stuck to it, the more my poses started to develop further and I am proud of the five that I have achieved!
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