Mend Me Blog

For some reason that is currently beyond me, the UV mapping is wrecked on the monster when I link to it in a scene. I didn’t notice until I rendered out the chase scene and saw the monster closer and wondered why it looked like it had wavy camo-like colouring. What is most odd about this is that in the original file the creature’s textures and mapping is fine, but as soon as it is linked to in a new file it breaks. (more…)

My plan for the monster’s eyes worked. The eyelids don’t block all the light so it is best to keyframe the lights and just synchronise the energy value going up as the eyelids open.

The trajectory of the lights had to be tweaked to get the right spill

(more…)

Disconnected from my COG *sniff*

It has been good using my own armatures for this project as they are far from perfect but this means that I get a chance to experience the pitfalls of various methods and appreciate how much of a difference the quality of the rig makes to the animation process. After reading and working through how to make rigs and the principles I am confused about a number of things. Firstly, I have been cursing the lack of a COG (centre of gravity / root) bone in my lil-boy setup but after using the monster rig that does have a successful COG bone I learnt that this destroys the use of IK legs as the feet then glide unless you adjust the controller backwards in sync with the COG. Moving the COG bone forward and then attempting to sync a scurry (in the case of the monster) proved to be futile and thus by the end of the scene my monster was quite disconnected from its COG bone. I am unaware at the moment if there is someway to pin the feet to the ground so that a walk cycle can coexist with COG movement, but that would be nice. (more…)

I am noticing that the IK spine is acting oddly. It seems that in certain positions the hips/stomach twitch as if the solver can’t decide which way to pivot the bone. It is making it awkward in the crouching positions. I discovered a “Hinge” button that makes bones not inherit the scale and rotation of their parent bone – a little late in the piece but possibly useful to know in the future to make better rigs.

Yes I do want real hair but it is not going to happen. Perhaps on the next revision given that this character is successfully linking into scenes. For now it will just be mesh hair. The texturing kinda looks like wood but given the context hopefully it’s good enough… still got all the matte paintings to do – eep!

This scene was actually very easy to do. It involved creating the mesh of what the creature would look like fully formed and using shape keys (similar to blend shapes I think) sculpt the form backwards in steps. Breaking it into steps not only allowed finer control but also prevents a linear growth that would give the trick away. I wanted this shot to link with the monster later on through the texturing and hinted shape.

Growth texturing

I had thought of using particles to do the boy’s hair but this fell into the same basket as using cloth for the clothes – not enough time given my lack of experience with 3D and total lack of knowledge of Blender at the start of this project. I have come across various tutorials that make it look quite easy to do the hair but I have to prioritise what features to delve into.

So my solution is to just model the boy’s hair as mesh and pass it off as a stylisation.

Finally I can start focusing more on the lighting in the scenes now with the boy textured.

He just moisturised... spec got turned down after

(more…)

And here it is:

(more…)

I had hoped to to either model wrinkles in the denim on the lil-boy and/or do the high-res mesh-sculpt and normal map that to the lower resolution model. Sadly temporal budgeting kicks in again and I won’t have time. That being said I have spent some time painting weights so that the mesh deforms in a way that looks like wrinkles.