Modelling minor characters

Modelling some minor characters at the moment, they don't have to be as fancy because they're in the background. I'm also making use of the stuff I've already modelled in the past like ribs and the hands that I used for Lep.

I would love to have the candles lit on the deer/horse but I'm not sure if I can be bothered putting a fog box thing on each one or whether I should them in in post. It all sounds pretty annoying to do it either way to be honest.

wing testing

Did the feathers on Drak. Last time I did wings I simulated the feathers, this time round I'm trying out a soft bind. The feathers stretch when the wings move, I'm trying to decide whether I want this to happen or not. All in all I much prefer doing the wings this way, it's a lot easier controlling where I want the feathers placed(especially along the very front bits of the wings where the curve is extreme). I was also curious what the fur would do when I bound the model but it seems to be behaving. I'm  not sure if I want to soft bind the vertibrae or just parent them directly to the skeleton, presumably that is the next test. I also did this test because I wanted to double check that draks little claw things could actually reach the table in the animation(see the bottom picture, which is the wing flat against an imagined surface.).

Modelling so far, testing fur, early stage lighting tests

Lots of stuff, been modelling furiously. Lep is pretty much done and ready to be UV unwrapped. The only thing left to do is the bicycle chain but that should really be done during the rigging.

Chucking some pictures of the modelling. Chucked on some defacto chrome texture, its really not going to be looking this shiny.

Otherwise been working on Drak. Used the vertibrae that Sarah modelled to save time on the tail so special thanks to Sarah. I have just started tinkering around with the fur to try and get that right. Still not sure if I'm going to add some sheets of feathers to the neck, I'm going to have to expirament with how that looks after I get the feathers onto the wings.

Finally I thought I'd add a picture of one of the lighting tests that I did a while ago. I was messing with volumetric shadows and fog;

Modelling paws

I wasn't satisfied with the design of the paws on Lep because there's going to be several close up shots of it.

Previously I was just going to use bones but it wouldn't explain how his hand would mechanically work. Instead I did some research online about prosphetic limbs and I found this elaborate 150 year old victorian prosphetic hand that looked amazing. So I have been modelling it mostly exactly (omitting the thumb).

I just chucked the chrome texture on to see how it looked and it heavily reminds me of the bridge on my electric guitar. Obviously when I get it all UV unwrapped I'm going to dirty it up way more than this. Next I'm going to try and incorperate some of the bones above to make it more asymetrical.

Ka'adok

I have been restraining myself from posting anything of my current project online just incase it conflicted with any competition requirements. However now that I have gone through the terms and conditions of the competitions I want to enter it is clear that it is safe for me to publish what I've been working on. There is a huge backlog so posts will be thick and fast.

I am currently modelling. There is going to be a lot of modelling in this project so I am hoping to blitz out all the modelling in one go then all the UV unwrapping in one go etc. etc.

The character that I am modelling currently is Drak, I have pretty much finished his skull, with the exception of arranging the teeth. It looks rather smooth right now but as a part of my pipeline I am transferring the models into mudbox and bringing them back out again after roughing them up, so by the time I'm through with it this skull is going to look pretty knarled up.

Reel of facial rigging expiraments

Newer more simpler facial rig

I found the last rig to be a bit slow and I wanted to speed it up quite a bit  to make it more efficient.

I found this rig on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qeOFibRmoo which it's clear that it's really fast at creating expressions. I thought about how this might be done and I came to the conclusion that I might be able to get a similar effect if I added a set driven key between blendshapes and the controllers.

Firstly I had to think about wrinkles on Phoebe. I had to add geometry to her face because she wasn't built with wrinkles. This caused her skin to become a lot less smooth, it's clearly a lot better to start building a model with wrinkles in mind than add them to a pre-existing one. This is an expirament though so I wasn't too worried about it.

Next I created lots of blend shapes, one for each wrinkle. I stuffed up with some of them because I lifted the wrinkle in the blendshape, thinking that wrinkles fold up(which they do so it's not an unfair assumption). However it became clear when I added the blendshapes to the controllers that the controller lifts the skin up anyway so some of the wrinkles that I did don't look like they form naturally. Her wrinkles have been extremely exaggurated for the purpose of understanding how to make the rig work.

Then I added driven keys between the blendshapes to the controllers. This means when I pull the controller in the corner of the mouth up it increases the nose crease and pushes the cheek out, creates crows feet and wrinkles on nthe nose. If I pull it out it creates a crease happens in the cheek. Similarly if I pull the corner of the nose up it also deepens the nose crease and creases on the nose happen. When I pull her eyebrow up it wrinkles the brow, when I pull it down it creates frown lines.

One of the most effective blendshapes that I found was that of the eyes. Its hard to tell in the picture but I have made sure that the eyes change shape according to where she is looking(it's most noticeable when it's moving). To do this I simply used the eye control as the driver of the blend shapes. It combines the blendshapes well, so for example when she's looking up diagonally it will blend the up and side blendshapes together.

Unfortunately I forgot to make the other frown lines in the blendshapes stage which is a pain because they created the most trouble in the geometry because two sets of wrinkles crossed. I would have liked to have seen how they interacted on the model.

One other thing that I did which I will not do next time is I also let some of the controllers drive the other controllers. So for example I let the start of the eyebrow in the centre drive the controller next to it a little, then I let that controller drive the one next to that a little too. This allowed me to drag the whole eyebrow around using the first controller, it looks more natural and is faster than positioning all of the controllers individually. However it wouldn't let me control the the driven controllers if I wanted to edit the position. So this is why I won't drive controllers with other controllers in the future.

Another thing that I did was restrict the movement of the main eyebrow controllers by adding a curved plane attached to the skeleton then putting a geometry contraint on the controller(then hide the plane later). I could have restricted the movement in the attributes panel but the geometry contraint actually forces the controller to follow the arc of the plane.