Dragon Bait and Animate

I realise I've been pretty quiet on here but I have been working away at the 3D kitchen scene for Ping and Noodle over the last week. There still needs to be some colour tweaks because the character won't quite fit in with it just yet but I think it's mostly pulling down the saturation. Right now I have 3 light sources in the scene for the 2 windows and the door but I might swap a window out and add in a light at the microwave or the oven as a colour light but we'll see how it all comes together. At least now, if we're unhappy with something we don't completely have to re-draw it, we can just make a few tweaks and re-render.  In other news I looked at pulling a sketch Anna had done of Noodle into Photoshop and tidying it up. Then I took it into After Effects and tried out the Puppet Warp tool to animate it a little. It took longer than I thought but most of it was a learning experience more than anything. If we have the right character art we...

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...

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.

This week I started the 3D modelling for my character assignment having finished up the T-Pose and roughed out an almost-finished base mesh. I finished the base mesh but the topology was not ideal so when I took it into ZBrush I Dynameshed it before starting to move it around to block in my character. After the model was Dynameshed, I just started working on the general shapes needed to match the character concept art and T-Pose.  There is still a lot of work needed in the arms, legs and face but I roughed in the torso as well. I'm trying to keep it very stylised, using references from real anatomy studies as well as looking at some stylised sculpts.