Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Brynn Base Model Progress

I've been pretty busy lately working on Cinematics as well as Brynn, but I've made some decent progress the last couple of days. As always, I have to thank Nick for providing me with the base to create the head. Currently, all that's really missing is her hair. A WIP skull cap is there currently. I'm thinking I might need to go re topo that skull cap to better fit Brynn's messy ponytail. Otherwise all of her assets have been modeled! You can see her model in maya below!

I've also gotten around to UVing her too. I'll need to make another map for her normals but the hard part's already done.




 

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Plushy Knight: Playground Cinematic

My first portfolio piece is done, but there are still plenty of cinematics left to do. Here is the next cinematic that I'm working on. The Playground Cinematic

It's still WIP but it's close to being finished, minus a couple camera iterations or polish animation.


Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Brynn Ardele Orthographics

So as I'm finishing up my first portfolio piece, I decided to start working on my second project.

Brynn Ardele! A full fledged monk martial artist from a small temple at Gilderhall. Her weapons are her fists, which are often compared to battle axes. Occasionally flaming, occasionally flying, always exploding, Brynn's a force to be reckoned with. She's a commission from a close friend of mine. For me, Brynn will be a practice on realism and hi-res models, both of which I don't have enough of in my portfolio. Focus on cloth, proportions and the like.

I worked with my friend, who came up with the design, and created orthographics for Brynn, which you can see below.




Monday, June 11, 2012

Memory Tree: Animation Complete

Here is an animation complete version of the Memory Tree Cinematic. Currently, animation is finished. Apex cloth was added to little Gemma and there are plans to add them older Gemma. Assets in the scene are placeholder for now, including lights and materials.

Enjoy!

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Memory Tree: Body Language Complete

Just completed the Body Language for the cinematic. At this point, a majority of the work is finished, all that's left is the facial language and adjusting values with the APEX cloth. :D

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Memory Tree: Second Animation Pass, Part 1

It's far from complete but the Memory Tree has about half of it's animation fleshed out with body language. There were a couple of camera changes as per request.



The last couple of weeks have been rather overwhelming. Seeing how my first portfolio piece and my tasks for Plushy Knight coincided, I have been doing nothing but working on PK. I moved onto the fleshing out the animation a couple of days ago, working my way through the four memory sequences and, out of no where, I found myself stuck on the tire swing animation.

Two things came to my attention then. Gemma needed IK/FK switching if I wanted her hands to stay on the rope of the tire swing. I had never done IK/FK switch before and had only just learned the theory behind it. This would be my first time applying it in practice. I figured I should write a script in case incidents like this would happen in the future.

So my work on the cinematic came to a grinding halt the last couple of days. The issue wasn't making the IK/FK switch for Gemma, it was turning it onto an automated script that I could use across characters.

I am no tech artist. My script probably won't work on anyone else's rig except my own, but a great majority of PK's rigs are mine anyway. Currently it generates the two skeletons (FK, IK) for the main skeleton to bind to, creates the IK handles for the IK arms, connects everything to their respective controllers and then generates set driven keys for the FK IK blend. This does require some adjustments to my original rig which I planned on adding to my script but I had already done those adjustments by hand so it never really made it in. I had already spent two days trying to get this rig to work anyway so I figured I better not waste any more time on this.

All so Gemma's hands can stay on the tire swing. :[

On the other hand, I learned about the 'substitute' command. When used in conjunction with the rename command it mimics maya's Search and Replace Name command which is nice since the searchReplaceNames command doesn't seem to work.