Rigged and Ready

Further to my earlier post Sheldon is now in fact completely rigged and ready to go, so here's a quick test to show him off in all his buggy glory....

Update of sorts, inspirational imagery and a bit of personal art.

Well then, its been quite a while (for me) since my last entry here now hasn't it? Been a bit of a busy week, partially with work, partially just life as usual.

Nearly finished rigging up my bug for animation now, just tweaking the joints where I've learnt how to put limiters on them (so very cool). So here's a quick screenshot to show how that's going so far:

Obviously he's much less sophisticated than Clara in the sense that he has just plain joints rather than controls, however being just a bug it wouldn't really be necessary to do otherwise.

Apart from that a friend showed me an image a few days ago that really blew my mind when I saw it (sadly I was on the way to work so didn't get a chance to post this sooner). This image was draw by someone as a celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the Legend of Zelda series. The thing about it that really made me happy was the inclusion of so very many characters from the lesser known games, particularly the oracle games, whom you don't see much art of around the net. So that cheered me up in an otherwise stressful week.

Also here's a video of the image being drawn which is really impressive to watch.

One day I swear I'm gonna draw that well. Wish I could buy this image for my wall...

Apart from that I took a little personal time to do some drawing after work this weekend. Though I'm really enjoying the 3D stuff I've been learning since I started the Masters 6 months ago now, I'm really starting to miss doing some straight up drawing, especially my own personal characters. My deviantart page (http://theblindprophetess.deviantart.com/ for the few of you who didn't follow me there already)  hasn't been this silent in years.

So yeah, started a quick portrait of my old character Sophia. Dunno when I'll finish that but after a rusty and frustrated start I'm feeling a tad more inspired than I did a few days back so that's nice.

Its also the first successful (if unfinished) picture I've done directly into photoshop without a pencil sketch so that's a nice little milestone.

Steam and metal

Well today's progress so far consists of adding particle effects and various small animations to bring the bug to life a little more before I start rigging it.

So here's a little video to show that so far:

Working out the bugs

So I've made quite a great deal of progress with my Steam-bug today and even gone as far as finishing the untextured model, so yay!

Here's how its looking so far:

EDIT

Its now a quarter to midnight and Mr bug aka Sheldon is all textured and pretty now:

Uninspired

Hmmm recently I cannot help but feel rather uninspired and I'm not sure why....

I think with the finishing of Clara's rig I'm feeling a little at a loose end and cant get into my new project.... design a bug .... basically to do something similar as the what I did testing out her facial rig by having her look at something.

Finding it increasingly more difficult to concentrate though which is most annoying. I guess its cause I expected to go onto a second character now so I could start work on the daring duo....

Oh well


Anyways, this is the design I came up with eventually. I decided that since I was working in the theme of steampunk, then the bug may as well be mechanical too:

Eyes Fixed

Well thanks to some advice by my tutor, and the advice of poly-face.com, I finally worked out the parenting issue that was plaguing the eyes of my Clara character so that she can finally look around and move her eyes at the same time, as shown in this video:

I'm so happy to get this finally fixed as it has been driving me bonkers for ages!

Creating Clara - Update 6

Still struggling to fix poor Clara's 'flying about' eyes, but despite any progress with that at all I've still managed to play about and make some small animations. Just a couple of poses, but even just these took me all day and were rather frustrating so I'm rather proud.

Creating Clara - Update 5

Well I'm having a frustrating week thus far I'll admit.

Finally successfully managed to rig and weight Clara to a satisfactory level... though I'm very annoyed with how badly the skirt moves, I didn't realise that a skirt would be so very much of a problem to weight as this but I can live with how it is right now I think....

What I'm not happy with are the eyes, although the controls for them work great when the head is static, If I move the head or upper body controls so that the head is no longer in its neutral or starting position (this includes leaning in any direction or tilting/turning) then we have a problem.
The eyes seem to move fine and stay in place in the head, but the minute the eye controls are adjusted they float into or out of the head in a very bizarre manner, granted still aiming at the controls, and I'm not quite sure how to fix it....

Going to have to ask my tutor about this when I'm next in on Friday, though that seems to waste an  awful lot of time, and for now just don't look at it and try my best not to cry.
It seems that thought the eye controls are parented to the full body controller and therefore move with the full body, they aren't parented to the head controller which is the problem... though simply parenting the eye controls to the head controls just does crazy things, as does trying to parent the eyes themselves to anything but the main model mesh.... I'm really hoping to not have to re-weight it all at the end of this :(

On the good side I've learnt how to used locators to make sure the tools on the belt stay pointing down towards gravity at all times so that's a somewhat good thing I guess.

One problem down and one to replace it, but what can you do eh?

Even though its still not quite perfect and I haven't actually gotten any animation done yet, or the eyes fixed to work, here's a short video to show how the rigging works so far:

Lackadaisy Expressions

Just a quick update but I forgot to post this a while back. While researching into facial expressions a while back, I stumbled upon this delightful tutorial written by the wonderful artist Tracy J. Butler who can be found at her site Lackadaisy. http://lackadaisy.foxprints.com/index.php

I take no credit for anything in this image, I just wanted to share this with people as its the best expressions tutorial I have come across in a long time, I hope others find it as helpful as I did.

Express yourself

Well over the last few days I think I've made some pretty good progress with my Clara project.

I've learnt how to use blendshapes and started putting some into place to use for facial animation and here's what I have so far:

Also I have gone through a list of essential expressions (using an Internet meme) and attempted to see just how many facial expressions I can make using the few blendshapes I have. I must say I'm rather pleased with the results:

Normal

Happy

Pleased/Excited 

Goofy

 Smug/Evil grin

Forced Smile

Serious

  

Sad

 Bereft

Pout

 Irritated

Angry

Disgust

Confusion

Sleepy

Fear

Kissy Face

 

I must admit, after a hard day at my part time job, sitting here making faces with my model and drinking my golden syrup-laced hot chocolate I'm feeling pretty dang awesome!



Its all in the eyes.

Just another small update on the Clara model. With the use of a simple 'point to' constraint and some nurbs curves I have made some simple controls to... well control, the direction that the eyes of the character face. The eyes can be controlled either simultaneously with the box, or individually with the circles. Though the circles probably wont be used all that much (unless the character spends a lot of time cross-eyed) its useful to have and to know.

So even if its only a small update, its one more little step towards a fully animated character!

Also you can better see the specular map of the face in this video, with it being a close up.

So that's nice too.

Creating Clara - Update 4

Well its its now February and I'm pleased to say that I've made some real progress with my Clara model. In fact, she's all textured and done and I'm starting on the building of the skeleton!

Here are a few screenshots of some areas I'd like to highlight:

Firstly and most importantly the face. If you look carefully you will spot that I've learnt how to use specular maps, which basically means I've made the texture on the face matte or shiny where appropriate. So for example the lips are very shiny whereas the rest of the skin is not, as would be natural, also there is a very small amount of shine on the nose, forehead (aka the T zone) and the chin and cheeks. Just to add a little more realism than a plain matte all over face.

Secondly the lovely alpha textured lace, nothing special technically, but I think it looks nice.

Thirdly, though its already been shown in the previous images; the glowey effects on the lens and bulb textures. I'm really proud of the effect these give.

Fourth, the bump mapping on all the leather parts of the outfit I feel give a really nice touch.


Not to mention (even though its simply drawn on) I love the folds in the fabric that I did, as well as the seams button holes and stitching. I really took a long time on drawing all of these textures and its not too too noticeable so I just really wanna point all that out.

Lastly, on the lid of the bottle, as well as the brooch on her collar I really like the glass/jewel effects I managed to achieve playing about with the different attributes.

And of course, here's a nice turnaround video to show off how she looks as a whole, I really like the way the lights reflect of the metallic parts.