4th Week Rainbow that bap.

At the start of this week my focus was to iron out the rest of the weighting issues. I spent a lot of time tweeking the areas of the stomach and the back hair joints as they had the biggest problem following the spine. I used extra stomach and back hair joints as was suggested to me by magic g which helped a lot to create better deformation. Also moving between replacing and smoothing tools to ease in a natural looking deformation were things that I used a lot. I thought it would be nice if there was hot key to colour pick the strength of your weights like there is for picking colours in photoshop, this would make life a lot easier when weightpainting as you would be able to animate through the different deformation poses and then keep editing the weight colours till the deformation looked correct. Below shows the second pass at weighting Baps body rig, an also the new eyelid controls, back legs (shoulder) controls and the sticky ik's on the arms.



The final tweaks for the geometry's UV-layout was sorted out this week and I had a clean up of the characters geometry layers. Here is a quick wire-frame turnaround (low quality pending better quality video) of the character standing tall at 12000 polygons. I probably could have widdled this back down to 8000 polygons if I had more time to optimise the areas where geometry was needed and wasn't needed to keep a nice low poly count. I think the next character I work on il try to get the polygons down to a game standard level as my poly count is something im  trying to improve on keeping down while maintaining a decent level of detail.



The last thing I started to work on before being wisked back to environments modelling where I was needed was the eyes for Bap, I slapped a quick texture on to see how his eyes looked and weather the eye lids that me and simon had discussed would work with his character. We decided that for the time we had and how long things would take to make actual eyelids which had no design decided on, the simple geometry sweeping idea below would be our best bet and I think it turned out ok. With more time we could have made the eye lids more intergrated with the rest of the characters head, but luckily the texturing would be able to help out in this area.