So, i needed some new reference footage for my animation as i am struggling with at the point when the character starts to pull himself over the top of the diving board.

As i don't have access to a diving board of the same design as mine i used a selection of objects from around the house to come up with a suitable setup for the actions.

This is what i got from it

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I will be doing more reference recording tomorrow at the university....well i will be hoping to find places to do it that will give me the look i am after.

Here is the first part of my animatic, not completely there yet but im still working at it.

The font is just a stock one till i find a better one as well.

Well its been 2 weeks since i started work on the final designed character and its finally done.

Its been a hard time getting it working but i think i managed it quite well, the problem is that it has only left me with with 4 weeks to get the other work done, now although i feel that this is possible i dont feel that it will be showing my skills at there full.

I understand that this problem is all down to me and the way i structured myself with the project over the year but i still feel i can come out of this with a good peace of work even if i work on it after the project is over.

So as for the project that i will be submitting, i am going to be requesting to my lecturer (Chris Wyatt) in my next meeting with him if i would be able to be marked not only on the animation but also the texturing, rigging and modelling of the main character, this will hopefully get me then extra marks that i dont feel i will be able to acquire with just the animation hand in.

So as i said at the start, i've finished the rig and the rest of the character set up, here is what i have.

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So As you can see from the images i have done quite a bit since the last post and i hope that now my rig is done i will still have enough time to get the animation out.

So what i did since the last post is i started by fixing the issues with the mesh that i mentioned before and then begun to rig it.

For the rig i used a small amount of reference from other rigs that have been made and tried to develop my own techniques that i felt would work.

One of the main things i found helpful was the rig from Pigeon Impossible, it used a small expression code that was placed on the visibility option that would bring up a feedback disc on the wrist to state that the arm was being pulled to far and may start coursing problems.

Expression:

cond( ctr_dist( Emile.Right_IK_Arm_Root.kine.global.pos, Emile.Right_IK_Ctrl.kine.global.pos ) > 6.9, 1, 0 )

For the spine i thought of a easy way to stop the body from stretching without coursing crippling to the over all movement.

To do this i placed a 2 bone chain and parented the root to the chain to the hip object and the effector to the top vertebra.



As you can see from the last image on the right the green bone is the 2 bone chain i have mentioned. This is stopping stretching but not limiting movement as you can see from the other images.

Another useful feature i have implemented is the use of a reverse foot control. This gives the animator easier control of the foots rotation and will essentially generate smoother animation.



Before starting the final rig for this character i started by making a demo rig that used all the techniques that i thought i would need and then chose the things that i felt would be needed by Émile to preform him actions.

Some of the things i chose not to include where things such as IK/FK switch....this was done by creating a "dead bone chain" (a bone chain made of nulls) and then constraining them to the IK chain or the FK chain and using a slider to blend between the two of them......i have used the same technique as i did in the demo by making the dead bone chain and constraining them but only made an IK chain. This is so that if i feel that at any point i may need a FK chain it will be easy to make one and fit it to the rig without any enveloping or weight mapping problems.

Other things i didn't include were expression scripts that would control the visibility or objects through sliders, these were not needed due to the single IK chain but can be also easy implemented if need be.

Once all the enveloping and rigging was complete i started work on the UV Mapping. As i had never done this before i found it a new and challenging experience. After i had learned the basics it become a little easier but it wasn't till work started that i begun to understand it better.

To make it easier i started with creating clusters of the main body parts for easy access to the sections when unwrapping, this helped me out a lot and i found that i didn't need to keep going back to the model and reselecting the polygons.

I had to use several projections on some sections of the body such as the feet that required 4 projections and then stitched together to create the final projection and reducing the deformation of the texture.

After the mesh was unwrapped i ended up with this....



Then i moved on to coloring it in Photoshop and producing this....



one of the hardest parts i found when texturing was the eyes. This was because i wanted a specific style to them and couldn't work out a way of producing it.

some of the references i used where from Tim Burtons Corpse Bride and the Road Safety Advert.





After several different versions of the eye colors i ended up with this and i feel that it worked best for what i was wanting.



To save from having to model out the toes i also used an old game character technique where in you texture the toes as if they where there, this results in this....



Once it was all complete i finished with this character and i feel for my first fully textured and rigged biped character i did a great job of it.

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Well that's all for this post. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as i enjoyed writing it. I hope you got something from it also.

I hope to have a meeting soon with my mentor to discuss the marking as mentioned earlier in the post, so keep tuned for that and i will speak to you soon.

PS. please leave a comment and let me know what you think i would love the feedback.

Thank You.

Well if you read my last post i stated that i would be uploading some images of my character and that i would have the mesh, rig and texturing done.

Well that didn't go to plan as you may have already guessed as my post was on 11th and i said that the images would be up on the 12th......little late and still not what i would have hoped.

The reason for this is because i have had so many issues with the modelling that it just wasn't working.

One of my main issues was that i opened my scene file and the characters mesh ended up looking like this...

I couldn't work out why it was doing this but from what i could tell was that since i hadn't frozen the model since i started the mesh had created some sort of defect.

I managed to work this problem out by opening it up on a friends computer and freezing the modelling then deleting all the meshes that made up the character and then saving the scene again and once again testing it out on my computer to find that this worked fine.

Now i have the mesh looking exactly as i wanted it to (with a few exceptions) and i now need to work on the rig and the texturing although i feel that texturing will become a problem when it comes to the mouth.

Here is what i have so far (that works and looks right)...



Well thats it for this update, i hope to have the rig done by the next update so until then i hope you all keep well and safe.

bye for now

Well yesterday me and Chris finally managed to get together for a meeting and it all went as well as it could have gone.

We talked about what i  had done so far and if i thought that i would be able to get the work load done in the remaining 5 weeks (although we thought it was 7 weeks before i just check now :'(  ).

This means that im just going to have to work my ass off on this work and get everything done asap.

By the end of tomorrow my rig and textring for that rig should be finished, i'll be uploading images of that mesh as soon as its doen so keep a look out for it.

So back the meeting, we talked about what i felt i could do inthe short time. I feel that since there isn't much time left and that the animation focus is mainly at the end of the animation i will be polishing that bit of animation (the part where he reaches the top of the board onwards) and then i will have blocking up till that point, this way i still have a strong animation without losing any/much of the story behind it.

This is only a short version of the meeting as i have a lot of work to do and need to get back to it so i will talk to you all soon.

QUICK NOTE - I've uploaded some images i did near the start of the production that i forgot about let me know what you think by leaving a coment.....thank you - Images Here

Expression Sheet - Design Sheet - Proportion Sheet - Character Shapes                 
Original Design   -    Color Test
    

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