I’d like to completely blame it on the rigging and armature but I think that my animating skills are also to blame. Being the first walk cycle of any kind that I have done I am finding the timing quite difficult. In combination with time restraints and all the other things I need to get done the animation of the lilboy is going to suffer. That and the rig really does suck. If I had a COG/Root bone then I could at least just make one decent walk and loop it but I have to hand animate every step and with the rotation issue in the feet it is very frustrating.
Archive for November, 2008
Yep, the walk cycle sucks
Sunday, November 9th, 2008Monster growth is done… backwards
Friday, November 7th, 2008This 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
Global lighting
Friday, November 7th, 2008I found that for a lot of the open outdoor scenes and some of the complex scenes that the quickest way to light it was using this setup:
You have many spotlights parented to the verticies of a 1/2 icosphere. Since they are dupliverts you can control all the light from the single light below. By making them very soft one gets nice general lighting in a scene as a basis to add key lights and any other focal lights. For the darker/high contrast scenes I won’t use this at all.
Esiest way to do his hair
Friday, November 7th, 2008I 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.
Monster is textured!
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
Lilboy is textured!
Thursday, November 6th, 2008Finally I can start focusing more on the lighting in the scenes now with the boy textured.
He just moisturised... spec got turned down after
No time, no wrinkles
Thursday, November 6th, 2008I 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.
Monster eyes are getting there
Thursday, November 6th, 2008I have done some tests and looks like my idea will work. Though I didn’t anticipate the attention needed on the axis of rotation for the eyelids as it changes the character completely.
Sleepy monster
Still can’t bake AO properly
Thursday, November 6th, 2008I had this issue when I tried to bake ambient occlusion with the butterfly where it just didn’t work over the entire mesh. Now it’s happening again with the monster. Though I believe It may have something to do with the monster having multiple material assignments and UVs to various parts of the mesh. Once again I put it out to the community.
UV unwrapping
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008I have heard rumours about the greatness of Blenders UV unwrapping – quiet whisperings amounst the Maya folks, never too loud lest the wake the Autodesk overlords… After my brief spell with Maya and its UV I can say honestly that the Blender way is refreshing and logical. I also heard that someone thinks the same and has written a mel script to emulate it in Maya. Basically the metaphor is that of a seamstress where you demarcate edges on the mesh that the UV unwrapper will cut along. What is really good about this is the speed at which you can figure out where to hide the seams to avoid those horrible texture joins – or at least cover them up.
Carapace – even though the seams are identical on both sides it doesn’t unwrap symmetrically. When this happens either you have missed an edge somewhere or you need to just do it again which might mean that I missed an edge somewhere but didn’t find it…
