Ok so since my last post I have Finished modelling and pretty much finished rigging my characters. So modelling went fine seem to get through it quick enough and no problems really. Here are some turn arounds of my characters
Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.
Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.
Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.
Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.
Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.
Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.
Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.
Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.
So happy with them, was a bit worried about what Timmy was looking like but once I got his hair on he looked alot better and I know once he is textured he will look closer to what Iwant. The real problem I had was rigging as usual. There is just so much that can go wrong with it.The thing is I want to be able to create some really bouncy cartoony animation and so wanted to put some stretchy limbs into my characters which i have never done before. I started out reffering to one of the Gnomon rigging tutorials which is great if you have a coplex character but really wasnt necessary for my cartoony ones. He also used like a trillian bones for some reason which ended up making problems in end. I couldnt get the stretch to work correctly, everytime I would try and stretch the arm or leg it would just grow out in a weird way. Anyway I decided to scrap that technique and found a cartoon rigging tutorial by Digital Tutors which was so much simpler. He used just one bone chain for the arms and legs and used expressions to great the stretch. Everything work the way it was meant to. So once I got into rigging the characters it really didnt take too long to get them rigged. I had waisted so much time with my last rig trying to work out what the problem was it was really nice to speed through the rest of the rigs with everything going right. Anyway got them rigged up and really happy with how they moved. it also isnt to much of a complicated rig so is going to good when it comes to animating which Im really looking forward to now. Heres some more pics.
Ok so next was painting the weights, now I have had the oppertunity to do this on several of my rigs before so I was feeling confident that I wouldnt have a problem. It such an annoying tedious job I just kinda pushed through it as fast as I could. Managed get all the weights painted in a week. It one rewarding thing about it though is when you start to see youre characters move the way they are meant to, they really start to come to life.
So next thing were the blend shapes which again didnt have much problem but its just such a long process especially when you have four characters. I decided that I would do six expression for each character and that would hopefully give me enough expressions when I blend between them. I did see a thing online where a guy show that six facial expressions plus the neutral would give loads of expression when blended together. So that what I ahve done and hopefully its all I am going to need. looking back at more storyboard it does seem I have all the expressions I need. I also rigged the face at this point too. Setting up the jaw controls, the blinking eyes and eybrow tweaks. All together this took me just over a week. I did have a few very small problems with the cluster and the blrndshapes but that was just because the input order was the wrong way round so easy fix.
Ok so i ahve my charcters all rigged and modelled, but there are a few things I am still working on. I decided that for the fat kid and the old lady i wanted to use maya muscle to add a jiggle to there flabby bits. thsi was really easy and Im quite happy with the results. I think this will help in adding that little bit more of life to them. Here are the results.
Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.
Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.
Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.
but back to things I still need to do. I wasnt sure about using ncloth in my animation because I know that it can sometimes be such a pain and cause problems but when weighting Timmy's shirt and the old lady's skirt I couldnt get it to move the way I wanted. so it does seem I am going to have to use ncloth did some research and found a way i can just do it to the bottom of the geometry and not the whole thing so hopefully this will make it a bit easier. I am also still working on the hair. at the begining I wasnt too sure waht way i was going to do the hair. I designed my charcaters with quite stylized hair and I really didnt want to go put some realistic hair on them because I think it would just look weird and It seems like a hard thing to get right. i see so many student animations which have tried to use maya hair and failed. So the next idea was to use polygon planes with an alpha channel for the hair. Which seems like a great fast way to make hair but I dont think I would be able to get the stylized look that i want with that technique I did use this for my eyebrows though. Anyway decided to just model the hair as that way I could get the look I wanted. i am a bit woried what it will look like once textured so may end up using a mixture of plane as well will have see.
Ok one thing I also have finished is my animatic finally. i ended up loosing the one I did before as storyboard pro didnt want to read my file, not sure why might be because I started it on the trial version. anyway spent a day rediong that and then went through the timing with Andy and happy with how it is looking. Things seem to flow quite well and I think it gets the story across anyway really looking forward to begining the animation not long to go now.
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