The Books

Now with the book shelves done I moved onto modelling the books to go in them. Now during the animation I needed a book to fall off a shelf and land on the floor open. This means I need to create a book and rig it so it can open and close. For this I start of by creating a book cover that was closed. I then rigged the book cover with a skeleton and then skinned the book to the joints. This means that when I rotate the joints the books geometry should follow. Now with the book cover rigged I moved onto the pages inside. Now when the book open the pages need to part and go both ways, as well as deform so it looks like open pages. So to this I created to separate squares and added detail to make it look as if they were pages, then I did the same thing again but this time for open book pages. Now I added a blend deformer so that the geometry would deform from a closed looking page to an open looking page. So the last thing I now needed to do was to create attributes which would control the book so an animator would be able to open and close the book. I did this using set driven keys and this is my end result. I have to say out of everything I have created I am quite proud of my book as it looks and works a lot better than I thought it would.

Now here is when I make a huge mistake. I had created the book and along the way I had saved a simplified version. I though I would just be able to use this and copy it through out the library for all the shelves. The only problem being that there are loads of books in the library and the book I was duplicating was still quite detailed. Anyway, I ended up copying this book throughout the library but then Maya kept crashing as it couldn’t handle the amount of detail in the scene, So I had to redo all my books with a lower detailed model, creating books without backs and bottom panels .I got it done and the books were looking good on the shelves so I could move on.