Character rigging for animation.

This stage was the most complex and problematic of them all. it took about 3 more weeks than I had planned and it was a case of trial and error all the way through. Character rigging involves building a virtual skeleton for the models to be attached to and then creating controls for these skeleton joints to be manipulated and animated. Sounds relatively straight forward....not so much.

I eventually got there with the rigging process, and then of course came the process of painting weights. this was a nightmare to be fair. It can be described as making sure each part of the body is deformed correctly by the right joints. In layman's terms this is making sure the right arm control doesn't distort the left knee! Not always so extreme but this is still a long and detailed process that provided many sleepless nights.

In the end  I decided against having ether character walking in the animation to eliminate the need to have a perfect weight distribution for a believable walk cycle. But the upper half of the bodies were not without their troubles.

I got there in the end...eventually!

Progress with deadline a week away....

Unfortunately I have not been able to update this blog as regularly as I would of liked. I came into so many obstacles and problems during the latter stages of this project that keeping the blog updated just always went on the long finger and i never got around to it.

Needless to say the animation is more or less completed at this stage, now its just a case of getting the project report together to accompany it with a week to deadline . I will also have to create a poster for the project to be available for viewing on the day of presentation/deadline. (wed 30th)

Texture characters

I have more or less completed the texturing phase of my 2 characters. They are really starting to come to life, I still need to add hair, but I have not decided to use the hair particle system in Maya or just model some hair form polygons/  sculpt in zbrush. The former is a lot more complex and after experimenting with it for a day I did not like the results, but, with more research into this technique it might still be a possibility. Here are some screen shots of the textured characters.

I have also modelled and textured the scene. It will not come to life until lights ar added to the scene but i have tried to achieve the gritty, run down visual style i am aiming for.

I will now begin the process of rigging the characters, Gregory has advised me t research the ready made full body rigs that come with Maya but they may lead to problems with animation.  I will also set up facial rigs that will use blend shapes foe facial expressions and lip syncing.