Nurbs Lathe Avatar
This tutorial is aimed at the beginner who wants to make an animated
avatar from
scratch. Because making an avatar using
NurbsLathes is straight forward, much of
the detail in this tutorial can be ignored but is there to serve as a reference
for anyone who wishes to come back later to refine their technique and understanding.This tutorial should be ideal for any enthusiast from the age of 10 (perhaps younger with the help of a supervisor) onwards but to learn you must experience doing it, like eating good food, reading about it or even watching a robot do it for you is not the same as doing it your self.
How long does it take?
It takes the robot demo only 18 minutes from creating a seamless file to animating the avatar. Although a skilled user can perform many of the tasks faster, one should expect to take much more time to make art. The beauty of making art with a program like seamless is it is not like painting a picture, where one has to finish the process and start from scratch to make a new painting. With seamless it is trivial to make copies for the purpose of making variations of the original model. This makes it possible to not only make improvements on a single model indefinitely but also to evolve many different characters from the original model. It is also important to remember not to make art a chore, it should be done purely for the pleasure of it :)
Begin
Start the robot demo by moving the mouse to the top left corner
of the 3d window and selecting
nurbs lathe avatar demo:
All of the titles for the robot demo operations will be shown here in bold beginning with the operation number followed by the title itself. Any comments for the operation will be explained under the title.
0. Create a new seamless file
Click on the new smls file button
1. Create a skeleton of parts
Open the scene tree window
The node that looks like this
is called a Part node.
Part nodes are used for containing the triangles for the body parts of the Avatar.
To add a node to a node so that it branches out from it:
click on the node in the new node bar
and drag it to the right of the node you want it to branch out from and then release the mouse button
Nodes can be referenced by name. To give a node a name, select it by clicking to the right of the node's icon and then
type in the name.
The following example shows the first Part node named as pelvis and the second named
as neck:
To delete a node:
right click on the node and select delete
Parts Needed For Our Avatar
For our avatar, create a structure of parts and name them as shown:
2. Add floor and height guide
Before we start it is important to add a floor and height guide by clicking
The floor is set to -1.75 meters which is the standard Blaxxun floor level in relation to an avatar. For a different standard that uses a different height for the floor change the height by changing the Seamless node's translation field:
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