First time using a facial rig

Decided to have a go with a facial rig. I just used phoebe as my model.

I used the speed facial rig found for free on creative crash

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/speed-facial-rig-enhance-your-character


Found it interesting and challenging to do, especially as the guy doing the rapid rig tutorial wasn't speaking english(but I got there in the end).

It ended up being a combination of bones and blendshapes.

I then tried to emulate some footage from a film.

I'm thinking it might be a good idea if I try doing a 30 second club animation to get myself into practice, because my animating is still not that great.

UV unwrapping in blender

Today I was going to model a plane in blender and unwrap it but it turns out I've spent the time just learning how to UV unwrap.

Because blender handles its materials and textures in a way thats a bit different than maya, I was unable to work out how to simply put a reference image on a plane. That's why I've spent today working out how UV's work.

The problem was that a lot of things in maya happen automaticly so you don't think about them whereas in blender it has those properties but you have to turn them on! For example syncing between the UV's and the 3D model. And to cut the UV's you have to mark the edges which the equivalent of cutting, although handily you can unmark edges too so its not like maya where you have to stitch it back together if you accidentally cut the wrong thing.

I found this tutorial helpful;

http://blendersushi.blogspot.co.nz/2014/04/texturing-uv-editing-and-3d-paint.html

and this you tube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ha2rFR6qO0

And pretty much this is all I've done today....learn how to unwrap a sphere(crappily but it was only so that I would learn the tools)

Beginners tutorial in Blender

I've decided to diversify in my software so that I'm comfortable in using all types.

Today I had a look at blender using this beginners tutorial which gave me some flash backs for when I first started learning maya.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y__uzGKmxt8

I made a cup;

I got excited when I saw that there was a maya preset for the controls but they turned out to be too buggy so I'm using the blender hot keys.

It all seems to be pretty much the same except the rendering seems to be a bit different. For one thing I don't know what renderer it uses although I'm assuming it's just its own one. You can also create lights by emitting out of a plane(you can do this with maya but its not standard practice) and its common to blend materials(once again, it can be done in maya with particular materials but it isn't standard practice if you're just using blinns etc.)

I'm probably going to do a few more tutorials in blender to see how different the rigging and animation is. I think it's valuable to learn blender in case I don't have the funds to use maya in something commercial.

After blender I'm going to move onto 3DSMax so that I can do architectural stuff.

Painting skin-practice

Decided to continue the blog despite graduating because I still do study in my own time.

I noticed it was hard for me to paint people when asked by Mosely to complete concept art for him so I decided I would get better at this.

I have a lot of trouble with skin so I sought out skin tutorials online, I found several;

http://toyskunk.deviantart.com/art/Tutorial-Painting-Skin-in-PS-100328544
http://navate.deviantart.com/art/SKIN-a-tutorial-Part-2-145159387

I also found this site which I'm thinking of doing some of the tutorials

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/advanced-digital-painting-tutorials/

I'm also sketching faces every day because this was something that I have trouble with. I'm getting better but they still turn out wonky. I'm doing this by sketching faces from films.

Which is why my skin practice is a wonkily drawn Josh Brolin(No country for old men). Not bad for no reference though.

For this I used the ToySkunk tutorial from deviantart(above)

Here's a progression reel

compositing 13

I composited shot 13 with what I had. Unfortunately because my renders were interupted several times over the last 3 days(plain bad luck) I've got problems with parsed files and I can't go and grab the originals off the computers because I've had to switch computers so much. So phoebe doesn't have a body in the last shot and there's all sorts of ridiculousness going on with the turkey but at this stage I just wanted to hand it in. I'll have to polish up all the mistakes later.

Other stuff I modelled

I modelled the Pacheco-Sjobergs very roughly because I thought I'd have a go at getting them in the scenes. Now I know that I don't have enough time so they aren't going to be used. Same goes for the interior of the train carriage which I modelled various books and furniture etc. I thought I'd put them up on the blog even though I'm now not using them.

deadline

deadlines approaching, still not going to have a lot of stuff handed in. Shot 7 can be composited together, still not happy with that one though because I tried a different light on phoebe that didn't work out and the vue render didn't animate well(scale problems) so I'm just dragging a frame in after effects.

I'm trying to get shot 12 and 13 done. I had trouble with the dress again in shot 13, always the right sleeve. I've changed the shape of it slightly because I noticed it collided with her shoulder, we'll see if that fixes the problem. If that was the case then I'll be able to fix the shirt in shot 7 too.

Shot 12 I'm using the bound dress instead of a cloth sim. I have to have the dress being pulled up by the dragon, I tried this with the ncloth dress and used a block inside the dragons mouth that was attached to the dress with a point constraint. Unfortunately the movement in the shot is so violent that I couldn't keep the dress from ripping off so I decided to used the bound dress instead. I'm going to use the bones in the bussle to shape the dress like its being pulled up.