Maya Practise - Blend Shapes (Alien Squash and Stretch)

  In this tutorial, we looked at how to use blend shape in betweens to help with our animations. This means taking 3 extremes, and placing them onto one control, so we don't have to keep playing around with the characters attributes.

  Importing the files provided by university, we have our little alien creature. First we select the alien group (containing the eye and creature) and placed it in to component mode. This is so they link together, then created a lattice deformer. We changed the lattice size to make it bigger, moving the pivot point to the grid so the character will squash and stretch correctly.

  We squashed the character, duplicating it and moving the new copy aside. We also did this for the stretch. 

Squash

Duclipated

The same was done for the stretched version.

Blend Shape Editor

Animation Editor

Opening the Blend Shapes and the Animation Editors, we made sure the settings was clear.  Firstly in our options, we check the In-between box. This will allow us to combine shapes and make a whole new control. With this on, we firstly clicked on the round alien, then the squashed and then the stretched, programing the forms and giving us the control needed. So, as we don't need all three Aliens present, we hid the round and squashed versions. The blend shape control is now on the stretched one, and will become our template.

Blend Shape Control

Connection Editor.

  Next we made a NURB control for the alien using a circle, sizing it upwards to fit the whole creature. Opening the connection editor, we linked up the attributes to each other, but we need one more. So, with the NURB selected, we went into the channel box and opened the add attribute menu, and created the Squash attribute. 

Added Attribute and modified limits.

   Selecting the squash slider from the blend shapes menu, and reloading into the connection editor, we could link the control and the squash attribute together. As the squash and stretch was so extreme, we placed a limit of 0.2 for the squash and 0.7 for the stretch, keeping a default shape of 0.5 (most rounded).

Fixed Limits in the Attribute Editor

  So once these was done, placing keyframes on our timeline gave us the squash and stretch motion. Then using translate X, we added a forward movement on the squash, and static on the stretch. We then placed a off set infinity control on the pre and post cycle. when expanding our time line, then alien creature then continues to bounce off the screen.

Playblast of a single Alien

  Following this, the goal was to duplicate the aliens, but with all the animation and connection it would be difficult. So, We used the duplicate special option to create a exact copy and placed 5 of them in different places. 

Duplicating Aliens

The final Set. 

  So to not make them all the identical in movement and add some contrast, we used the translate tool in the graph editor to give them different motions and speed. I could not get my computer to render, so I makes a few playblast and a final image render.

Play blast of Group Alien Movement

Final Render