BLendshapes

Finished my blendshapes for phoebe. I should probably start to rig and weight her now.

Mountain

Been sorting out the spires and making the mountain on the top of the bone ship. I'm not sure if its better to arrange the towers in one file then bring them in as a reference or bring in one tower in and arrange them. I'm doing the former at the moment because I don't want to have to place them in the final file. I made the mountain by doing a cloth simulation then texturing it in mudbox. I had a go at making the mountain in vue but it was too much of a hassle.

Otherwise I've been helping Mosely out with the art for his project;

front of the ship finished

I've been doing some artwork for Mosely's project and working on the bone ship today;finally finished the front of the ship;

finished modelling dress

Finished modelling all Phoebe's clothes. been having some fun with some quick cloth sims. The shirt really doesn't want to stay underneath the corset, I'm probably going to have to give it some more space inbetween.

Update on bone ship

I've been out at lornville helping with moving sets and digging dirt for most of the week, had no clean clothes within 3 days. Decided to continue work on bones of essimer stuff, I've been continuing work on the bone ship. Unfortunately I still havn't finished the front of the ship. I spent another 4 or 5 hours yesterday modelling the one off peices like the mouth of the ship.I've been making use of the animation motion path tool and the animation snapshot to make the chains wrapping around the skull at the front of the ship.

Heres the current iteration;

Dress modelling

Currently modelling the dress and it's going well. I'm using the cloth simulation to help place things and gather things.

front of the ship

Been working on the front of the ship again, finally finished the skull, I had to model it again because the original file corrupted. It's taken around about 6-7 hours to sort it out

Concept art

Forgot to put the concept art up here, these were made a couple of months ago when I was pitching the idea

texturing and making the clothes

Right now I'm trying to finish off Phoebe. I still need to finish modelling the hands and attach them to the body.

I thought I'd start texturing the face too, this seems to be going ok.

otherwise I've been modelling the shirt. I think I might have to start it again though because the gathering might be a bit too thick, it's making the shirt quite large.

cloth tests and older feather tests

I needed to find a way to gather fabric in an easy way. I know that I could have drawn a nurbs curve and then lofted it but I wondered if it was possible to gather ncloth in the same way that you gather fabric in real life; essentially drawing it together.

So I did experiments with a block that stretched using blendshapes and I found that it worked perfectly. I can then delete the type history so that I have solid drapery that I can place before turning it back into ncloth

I've experimented also with using point to surface constraints to attach the drapery to the model as well as to other fabric and they seem to stick pretty solidly

I tried placing the drapery the way that I wanted it on the model(sleeve, collar and body of the shirt) and I found that the seams were too thick(because of the gathering) so what I'm doing now is using a lattice deformer to compress the top and bottom (or what would be the seams) so that they are rather flat before I place them.

I also found some older feather tests with the dragon;

feather placement

Been working more on the feather placement on the head.

This time I've segmented the dragons head when creating the hair to make the curves. Then I've added different lengths for the hair so that the hair is shorter at the snout than it is at the back of the head. However all the feathers have the same width because its using one hair system. I may have to use several hair systems with different widths to get even more variation. I'm also going to have to hand draw the curves around the snout and eyes because I can't place them properly with gravity.

Modelling

I've also been modelling;

So far I've pretty much finished the dragons head, I just have to make eyeballs.

Same with Phoebe's head, it's pretty much done except I need to finish her hair and give her some ears.

 I've also started on her body;

more feather tests

Been working out how to place the feathers on the dragons head which I want to do using nurbs curves.

I've tried the method of drawing the hair straight onto the dragons face via this tutorial;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5L50ETOhc4

However this takes too long and I found that because I hadn't modelled most of the feathers on the model that I had the curves were flat on the surface of the dragon. I centred the pivot on all of the curves and then rotated them but they stuck a bit too far into the head of the dragon.

Another method I tried was using a script called dodomaster which worked very well but I found that I couldn't freeze transformations or delete by type history because the location information of the nurbs was attached to a locator(or something, hard to explain).

The latest method I've come up with with some success is to create a hair system on the dragon then change the gravity so that it goes in the same direction as the length of the head of the dragon. Then I put some start curve attract on the hair and start to playblast it. The hair starts to curve like a feather so I pause it to where I like and delete by type history and then delete the hair system. Then I rinse and repeat with different lengths to get some variation.

I've also tried randomly selecting these curves and creating several hair systems so that I can have some feather colour variations, as unfortunately one hair system only lets me have one colour for a feather

The result looks like this;

There's still lots of work to do; There are offending feathers that intersect, I'm thinking that I'll delete the feathers/nurbs that offend then start again

Another problem is that the feathers are too large on the snout and around the eyes. I might have to select certain faces(like around the nose and eyes and mouth) and create a hair system with shorter hairs as opposed to creating nurbs across the whole head like I've done previously.

The colour experiment was a partial success, I've actually got too much variation. Next time I'm gonig to vary the feather colours but they'll all be variations on the green.