The final countdown...3rd year begins

When we got back this term, we had to pitch our intentions for the year and any ideas. With the same group prity much as the pitch in 2nd year, me, emma, simon, matt and tom and now roy i think our idea had changed from a game trailer for release the beast to a short animation of a hunter of rair animals and the antics that ensue when his apprentice tries to stop him. I intended to do as much modelling this year as possible on the project and some animation later on in the project. I will also be helping out with rigging and uv unwrapping and maybe texturing and anything else that needs doing.

Wellwellwell for the first week we all sat round and decided on a solid idea which Tom and Emma have refined through a Series of different scripts. Once they got the rough idea and storyline down the more 3D Orientated of use me and Matt.L set about doing some of the low polygon models for the key props. The first Bit of modelling I did this term was the hunters gun which over the last week ive refined and tried to keep the poly count low on. I will also put some more detail in later once we know how close up we are going to be and where the detail will be needed on the gun. Below is a few images of the low poly model. My main goal was to keep the poly count as low as possible and to try not to put detail in places where it wont be seen.

Perspective view

Orthographic view

Also today as we are a bit low on things to start modelling until we have the storyboard finalised tomorrow, Tom commisioned me to make a crate which I am immensly proud of so I thought id put it up here so that everyone can revel in my glory haha Its possibly the best crate......in the world. I think its for the super dart which im going to model tomorrow fingers crossed. Fun times will ensue as Matt.L put it, we pull verticies all day long. mmm verticies. But on a serious note I cant wait to get fully stuck into the modelling this term as there is going to be plenty to do, as it looks like im going to have to take on the rigging again but should be a interesting challenge.

In the summer time

Over the summer I wanted to model and sculpt a character in mudbox. Once I started this I realised that this was quite a big task so i ended up spending most of my time just learning how to best use my graphics tablet to sculpt and the buttons and sculpting tools in mudbox. I did a lot of the modelling for the armour, belt and helmet in maya then brought them into mudbox to sculpt details into them which I enjoyed particulary with the helmet. I used the mudbox body preset for my gladiators main body so I could concentrate on the characters armour, clothes and accessories ect. I did however sculpt some muscle areas on the chect, arms, shoulders and stomach, but mainly just the areas that would be visable through the armour and clothes. As i spent so long learning the sculpting process and learning from my mistakes in terms of aproaching the sculpting of certain areas there is still much to do on the gladiator.

Below is the base mesh for the armour which I sculpted more detail into but cant find the file at the moment but I will post up when I find it.

Below is the Helmet which I spent a lot of time on playing with different helmet shapes, I still keep playing with it all the time and I need to have a clean up on the mask on the front as its all very uneven.

I still have to finish the upper body armour and the belt. I need to work into the muscles more and define them more. I need to make boots for him, shield if i am going to have one and a melee weapon of some sort, I think I want to have something a little more brutal and interesting than just a sword and shield so may make a range of weapons and see which works best with him. I also need to make some wrist armour and knee armour and maybe a arm sleave of armour. And most importantly I will need to learn and re topologise the character before I texture him. This probably wont get done now till we have handed in our major projects and i have more time available as this term im going to be fairly heavily loaded with maya work.

The following image shows how far the gladiator has come its only a mid shot has he has no underwear yet only the belt so it looks a bit silly if I showed the lot. I may make a few changes to the armour as im not sure about the shape,I was going for a early greek armour style.

2nd year life drawing.

Here is some of my life drawing from this year.

manrig WALKS SO HARD!!!!!!

I filally got round to testing the rig for the walk by animating a basic block through walk which is a bit jumpy and to smooth but thats due to my lack of animation practice and i havent properly thought out the timing i just wanted to show that the rig is able to be used for a animated walk. which it is as you can see from the 2 playblasts below. The first is a slower test walk just to get the basic feel and make sure the joints are all working properly. The seond playblast is prity much the same thing but with a bit more animation to it and all the manipulators removed so its just the geomtry being shown in the animation.

I think this went quite well and I think with a bit more time I could have made a decent walk with my guy. Now the problems mmm oh the list well the problems that I couldnt solve with the rig which I found that I couldn't figure out how to fix without starting the rig all over again was the arms had somehow moved them selves out of alignment with each other which I didn't notice till later in the rig and I wasn't able to fix it then. Also another thing that annoyed me was the right foot when I first tested it worked the same as the left foot, but just as I was doing secondary test when animating the feet for the walk the right foot heelrot y and x and toerot y and x where freaking out when I rotated them. I looked at both feet to see the differences and they were both connected in the same way and had the same channel box inputs all but the right foot had some more rotations than the left foot. This is the only thing that I could think was different and that not freezing this earlier caused this maybe but I wasn't sure and as I wasn't really using these rotations in my walk I didn't worry about it to much. The arms also seemed to remain attached to the top spine control manipulator which was good for basic movement but when I stretched the spine out a long way the arms would move up to far this was due to a incorrect constraint but all the other methods of constraint I tried where much worse and as I wasn't doing a great deal of stretch with my spine I left this as well. The only other thing I can think that I came toa dead end with was hiding stuff away so the rig cant be broken, I got most of the things I didn't want people to touch in a off limits group in the outliner and all the manipulators in another and I put the geometry on a sepperate layer so you could see it but not touch it, though I had some problems with the legs and arms as still being selectable but this was probably due to the way I had heirachied things but as I couldn't figure out a way around this I had to leave it. If I had more time i would go back and sort all these things out, this is something I will probably do in my free time anyways.

Mrrrr stretch

The stretchy was prity straight forward once I found the easiest way of doing it. I originally tried using clusters to control the movement of the back and the twist but this didnt work with my rig. I also tried controlling the spine straight from the spline curve cv's and attaching them to the manipluators but that was an epic fail. In the end I found the best thing to do was to use two seperate joints as control joints and use them in the same way as clusters to control the joints and then attach the control rig to this but I had to rearrange everything in the hierachy to make sure everything followed correctly. But overall once I found the easiest way that worked for me the spine was quite easy to do. Anyways the playblast below says it all really.

The next stage I made sure I had right was the shoulder I wasn't sure if I would need it but it was prity straight forward for this part so I decided to put them in anyways even though I probably wouldn't need them in the walk but I thought as may use this rig at a later date they may be useful. I just made sure I had some distinguishable manipulators from the arm anyways the playblast below shows the range of movement in the shoulder. It will look wierd and disconnected but thats just becuase i dont have any skin on my rig its just basic geometry.

The last main thing to do on my rig was the neck and head. I decided as i didnt require to much movement in the neck during an animated walk so what I did was make a baisc manipulator and constrained the neck and head joints to this and then heirachy the manipulator to the top spine manipulator. I made sure the corresponding joints were connected so the head followed the rest of the body but could still move on its own this took some trial and error but I got the right order of things in the end. Below is the playblast showing the rage of movement in the head.

The last thing i did before animating the character manrig as a whole was to make sure everything was heirarchied correctly and hidden away the bets I could. Also everything needed to follow the main body of the rig when animating so that nothing was left behind. I had to look at a variety of rigs to see how others had done this. I found a way that worked for my rig after a bit of epic failing but in the end i feel my rig was quite tidy. The other thing i spent some time doing was locking away things in the channel box so things couldn't be animated that were not supposed to be on the manipulators i think i did a good job of this but there were still many many things i probably have to lock away but i dont know how to, ive tried locking the geometry so you cant delete it when you select it in the outliner but its still deletable or it disapears so i dont know how to get round that one yet.

rig adi dig dig

Right almost finished the man-rig not!!!! the list of problems ive had along the way are huge, they have mainly been to do with missing small but key details out, not constraining things correctly, forgetting to freeze transformations, putting things correctly in the heirachy and not aligning joints properly. Other than that ha the rig went well in some places and was fun to do when it worked seeing the character being able to come to life was awesome despite my man only being a stick figure. The next thing i went over quickly and it didn't take to long with was the finger manipulators for my hand which was easy enough. For this i used set driven keys as with the feet and made a manipulator to accomadate them. This all worked out fine as before so i only spent minimal time on this, though form this ive found that set driven keys can be very useful for making your own movements, eg the last action of the hand in the set driven key video below i made was my own called love fist, where the fist clenches then sticky out the index and pinki fingers in defiance. This is a tool i may use more when i am more familier with rigging and i will be able to make hand gestures which people may find useful when animating the hand into common poses.

Levels all textured up.

Below is the result of many hours crippling my hand trying to get used to painting textures onto the map levels in order to gain a grater sence of the depth and feel of each level. I used a masive amount of textures of my own from previously collected textures from various sorces and some of the more specific like road and desert textures from the web. This is the final textured images for each level and the top picture acts as a small key to help get the jist of different aspects throughout the levels.

Below is a rough key to help identify with different hights and important locations on the maps.The levels are as follows below; Yukon, Urban suburbia, Farm yard, Ghost town and Bananaland (jungle).