Maid Chan anime character

Here are some screen shots of our Maid Chan character that we worked on in the last class.
Maid Chan is a computer avatar from the popular Japanese anime 'Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo'.

First Class

During our first class, we learned some basics for using the 3DS Max program.  \We learned to control the viewport and how to create and manipulate basic 3D shapes.  We learned how to animate and render.  We created a biped skeleton, did some basic animations, and rendered it to a movie.

Here's a summary of keyboard controls:

Think of the viewport as looking at your scene through a camera.
You can rotate, pan, and zoom the view using these keyboard keys:

• Middle mouse button + ALT-KEY = ROTATE the view of our scene about the selected object.
• Middle mouse button = PAN the view left/right/up/down
• Mouse wheel = ZOOM the view in and out 

After creating several objects in the scene, you can manipulate individual objects using the mouse and these keyboard keys:

• Q-key = enable just the pointer, so that you can click and select objects
• W-key = enable the MOVE tool.  Then click drag on one of the 3 arrows (X, Y, and Z) on the selected object.
• E-key = enable the ROTATE tool.  Then click drag on one of the 3 rings (X, Y, and Z) on the selected object.
• R-key = enable the SCALE tool.  Then click drag inside the yellow triangle to scale the object larger or smaller.

Here's a move render of one student's BIPED animation.

Click this link to download a high resolution copy of this movie.

Next class starts Sept 8, 2016

The next 'Create 3D Anime Movies' class starts on Thursday Sept 8, 2016, 6-8PM.    In the next session we will model, rig and animate a 3d character, and then render a short video clip of the animation.  The class is free, and has a very relaxed format.  It’s open to adults and kids above age 13.    The class is intended to be an open forum for people at all skill levels for exchanging ideas related to their 3D animation projects, to practice or learn how to do 3d animation, and to show off each other’s work.   Our focus lately has been on using 3D graphics tools to render 2D looking cartoon animation.   

Here’s a quick overview of what we plan to do in the next class.  We use Autodesk 3DS Max to model and animate.   (The software is free -- students can use the free student version.  Others can use the 30 day demo version.)  Here’s a screen shot of the last anime style character that I was working on in the class.  The facial animation are 2D:  eye blinks and mouth animation (matched to a voice track) are from bitmap images using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.   Afterwards, some 3d facial  and hair animation is then added to the head.  After modeling and rigging the body, skeletal animation is applied mostly using motion capture.   We use mostly freely available motion capture data.  And, we sometimes use the Xbox Kinect to capture our own motion capture.  The final output is a short animation movie rendered from the 3D character.   That’s a lot to try to do in just 8 weeks (one 2 hour class per week).  So, I usually just explain all the steps in the workflow, and then focus on 1 or 2 aspects for a few weeks, and then jump to the end with a finished character and add animation and render to a movie.

Hope to see you there!

Russ DeWitt