Dragon Bait and Animate

I've spent the last couple of weeks tweaking the character mesh to tidy it up for rigging. I used Advanced Skeleton 5 again to rig this character as well as looking at a few online tutorials to make sure I got the most out of the rig. I also used Advanced Skeleton to build a facial rig which works better than expected although the blink function didn't work properly so I added in my own blend shape to allow the character to blink. I also tweaked some old assets and built a couple of new ones to bring into the final environment.  I forgot that there was an email about sending in artwork that might be selected to be used on the Masters show posters so I posed my character and pulled together a render in Maya that I felt represented my project and compared to earlier work, I feel that this has a lot more style and personality. So now I'm pulling in all of these assets and final ideas into Unity for the final project and I hope to have this all set up b...

I spent a fair chunk of the day yesterday playing around with Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya and honestly, it's amazing. I wasn't sure how well it would work with my model because it is so low poly but I came out surprisingly well. So Advanced Skeleton gives you the joints from a template and once they're all lined up you can build the controllers to see how it will move. Because you do all of this in stages, you can change and update the rig at any point.  There are a few different methods to bind the skin and this is one of them, but in the end I didn't use the Skin Cage because it didn't seem necessary for my model. Once the body rig was done I spent a LONG time trying to get the facial rig to work. I was clearly doing something wrong the first few times I tried it because it worked just fine when I sat down and worked through it step by step! The skeleton also comes with pre-made walk cycles so I put my character into these to see how the de...

So I think I'm comfortable in saying that my master's project will be called 'Cure' so I'm just going to refer to it as that from now on. Yesterday and today I have been messing about with blendshapes. They seem really easy to set up and considering how low poly I'm working it seems like the best option rather than building an entire face rig that doesn't have that many polys to work with. So I've been doing some tests on how it might look in the end. It turns out smile is the hardest for me to try and represent on my model so I think I'll need to keep working on that. Otherwise, it's super fun and really interesting to see what kind of mix of shapes you can get too.

I finished a base mesh of my model and it sits at around 1600 polygons. From here I extruded clothes and hair before adding in some grey shades through Hypershade as well as making the hair pink but I'm not sure if that's going to stay. With hair, clothes, eyes and the 'device' in my character's ear, I have around 2000 polygons. I want to run these models past my lecturers to see what they think and if the character looks 'low poly' or just like I have bothered smoothing out the character.  With a model finished, I tried messing about with the Quick Rig tool in Maya which was actually super easy to use and gave me a pretty good base that I could build on.  There are some issues with the rig, namely under the shoulders and the hands that need to be tweaked in the future but it's a start.