UV mapping - also known as THE DEMON SPAWN FROM HELL!!!

Meh, i exagerate its not that bad *eye twitch*. Im just annoyed that i spent thre hours trying to sort out my mesh in a planer map only to find out that if i set it to a cylindrical map it does it all for me *another eye twitch*

Really should have consorted my stop staring book sooner rather than following the directions of some beetnick oddball on youtube.Ah well at least its working.

Here the final head in stunning greyscale! I still need to add eyelids (whihc ae just gonna be a two quarter of a semi circles that dissapear into the head, and the interior of the mouth which is modelled.

And here is a rough head using UV mapping, the head textures are made of plascticine photos, but i havnt put and swirls in there or bump in there yet so at the mo' the brown looks like its made of cloth and the muzle... i dont really know what the muzle looks like but i still dont like it. The lightnings nice though. I think i may need to add a displacement map as well as a bump... now i just need to lear how to apply a displacement map...

Onto more pressing matters a schedule!

Week 5 :
UV maping test - check, though still need to master the plascticine look.

Finish modeling - Just need to attach things together- hands, mouth, etc

Week 6:
Blend shapes - Hopefully wont run into any errors, did a test earlier and it was all working fine.
Rigging - Not gonna bother with FK, IK switch will just keep it simple.
Painting weights – Probably gonna be hell but as it stands im optimistic.

Week7: Start animating! Woo.

Week 8: Finish animating. Lights and Cameras (if they havnt already been done)

Week 9: Render and Hand in.

Note to self - blogspot is really shit at layouts when scheduling.

The Gogs.

Just re reading my blog and realized that I really need to show more evidence of where my inspiration for the project comes from. I metioned the gogs in an earlier post. Watching them is what made me decide to do a more complicated model than is perhaps necesary, I really large foreheads and how each charcter has very distinct design - if you didnt know they were a family you wouldnt have guessed it going by resemblence. I also really like the crude humour but dunno if i'll do anything like it in my animation.

Heads Up...

Just a progress report.

Spent the last week or so trying to get the head modeled. After several failed attempts in NURBS i decided to just go with polygons.

I was origionally going to have eyelids that were part of the face mesh and extruded out to blink using a blend shape, but when playing around with the mesh i figured it would be a heck of a lot easier to just have quarter of a sphere flip out as a eyelid similar to what max for maya has, this should fit alright seeing as its very similar to what they do in Wallace and Gromit and Tim Burtons puppetmotion films. I reasonably pleased with what ive got so far, a bit worried about the mouth but gonna spend the next day or so focused on getting it right, gotta do an interior mouth as well though it isnt going to be overly complex.

Heres the smoothed head with the smoothed body geometry, looking at it now i think the body looks a bit sparse compared to the hands and head, i may have to do a bit more to it to make it fit in better though thinking about it the ars arnt finished yet so will do them first and see what that does for it.

And here is the two halves put together quickly, that lower part of the mussle looks really shit and just drags down the rest of the face with it...will need to get that sorted. And then theres all the little things ive got to perfect on the head like getting the nose right and maybe bringing the eyebrows closer together. And for the record ears are a pain in the arse.

Its a start

Righty i thought now would be a good time to summerize what ive been doing towards modeling thus far.

These are the drawings that im going to be modeling with, You may notice that ive only drawn half of the body this is because when im modeling it i'm going to mirror the body to save time and effort though this is fairly common practise and im pretty sure anyone reading this already knows it.

And heres the final thing....nah not really. The day after i did the drawings to start modeling i was sitting listening to Jared when it struck me that it might not work. I had given him an enormus body and tiny little legs and so when he went down onto his knuckles his body might scrape along the floor. I didnt wanna loose so many weeks work only to find out this is the case so i did a quick rig using the model sketches
It works relativly well, im glad i did this and would incourage others to do the same because although the belly didnt drag like i feared i noticed a couple of other errors and things i wasnt happy with. For instance the arse stuck out ALOT more than it should have been so much so that it was nearly above his head ( you cant really see it from this angle) and the boobs sat alot further down the body than i liked when he was crouching like this. All these things have now been changed.

This is how the real modellings actually going. I doing it fairly low poly and then smoothing it out twice so you get the nice curves that im liking on the body and legs. The arms have smoothed in a way im not overly pleased with so i will fix it when i apply the smooth, this is probably gonna be a big headache but i dont know another way to do it.

Playing with Plasticine

To get the placticiney look i am going to UV map the model using photos of plasticine. I dunno if anyone else is doing this, if they are i havnt seen 'em doing it. People seem to just be using filters and effects within Maya to get the look of Plasticine. Anyway ive had a quick go and heres my first results.

Considering its a low quality quick test im pleased with the outcome. Theres alot of room for improvement though. The plastcine i was usinf was only about 3cm square so everything was kinda off, fingerprints were massive and covered everything, i countered this by using a gaussian blur in photoshop but the effect of them being so big on the 3cm clay doesnt really work. Because the fingerpints stretch round the cylinder they give a woody or layered rock effect.

The Concept Process

Righty my concepts all fin. Decided i would post it all in one go rather than create a new post everytime i put pencil t paper. Didnt really spend ages on this.
My first drawing didnt really know what i was doing and just did the first thing that came into my head after reading the brief.

Funny some of the stuff your mind comes up with... A scary version and some kiddy versions

Getting a bit closer to a design... and an attempt at a body.

Ugly Ugly drawings.

Finally a nice design. This is the design that I am using but when i first drew it came to the conclusion that it wouldnt work brilliantly in clay, so i then spent some time trying to develop the design to simplify it and make it rounder but in the end i thought i might as well go along with this one because it as my favorite and worry about making look nice in clay when i start texturing. When designing him in my head i always kinda pictured him as kind of an old fashioned victorian english teacher (a tad specfic) and i think this drawing just portraits it perfectly.
You can kinda see the influence from the main drawing especially in the last one but i still donet think that any of them work as well as the drawing they were based on.
I was trying to think of some claymation films that i know off other than wallace and gromit and i remebered watching one about cavemen years ago about the same time that W+G firt became popular. It was called Gogs and was about a family living in the past, so i went looking fo it and found a coupla episodes on the net, the first thing i latched onto was the fact that the models were fairly complicated and not that desimilar to what i had drawn, so i went back to the design i liked and devloped that a bit further, here you can see me playing with anatomy trying to get the body right and trying to give him a skull so that it give me some referance.

And there we go....I'm still not sure about the tie...we may loose that in modelling....infact we'll probably loose that in modelling.

Points of Significance

Forgot to mention the areas im focusing on...

Concept work - meh not so much, drawing the same thing over and over doesnt really thrill me, when i get a design i like i just go with it.

Modelling - Yep this is a point of focus. Probs gonna spend more time than is healthy stressing this area trying to get it perfect.

Rigging - Not really. Am gonna do the best with the least amount of work with this, i know its an important stage but its something i find really boring, the only half interesting thing about the rigging is blendshapes. So i'll make sure i do the best in the shortest amount of time.

Texturing - Yep I really wanna learn more about texturing this term because i know very very little about it, so i think i may spend quite a bit of time working this out.

Animation - Although i am going to be doing animation in the piece im not going to worry about the narration until i need to animate. Ive got ideas for stuff but i'll worry about exactly what im going to do when it needs to be done. Though im going to leave myself a couple of weeks to animate because this is what really interests me and will be a point of interest.

So points of interest: A little of all but mainly focusing on the Modelling, Texturing and the animation.