1. Creating objects

(ball bounce) - In this lesson we're going to explore the wonderful world of rigging software. (drilling loudly) To build a character at Pixar, we begin with a modeling packet. A model packet consists of a series of drawings or clay sculptures called maquettes that are a guide for modeling the character. For more important characters, there can be a lot of drawings. And for less important characters it might just be a scribble on the napkin. From these we build the model in the computer. I hope you enjoyed rigging the face for a snowman in lesson one. In this lesson, you're going to create your character in a similar manner to how Pixar built a snowman for the short film Knick Knack. Before starting, the rigger will meet with an animator and discuss what type of controls are needed. A character, like the army man from Toy Story, would be made from plastic. So its movements would be quite stiff. In contrast, a rubber snake would be quite flexible. Keeping true to the materials creates believability, the rigger and the animator work closely throughout the rigging process to make sure the animator gets all the controls she needs to make the character come alive and act. The animator will do various tests such as calisthenics to test a range of rigging. The final test is usually a fully active scene. In this lesson you'll write code to design your model, then rig your model with the former that you learnt about in the previous lesson. You'll start by drawing basic shapes, then you'll combine the shape to make characters, then you'll build there the former functions for translate, scale and rotate. And finally, you'll connect everything together. And in a bonus step, we'll show you how to animate your models. But first, let's think about what we are doing. All models have one thing in common, from the perspective of the computer, a model is just a collection of individual shapes. Each shape will be stored in the computer as an object. To create the shape of a circle, we'll put in the object all the data the computer will need to create that shape. In this warm up exercise, you'll create a circle for the snowman's body. If you're new to coding we have a short code review before the exercise. Be awesome!