how did it go?

so overall i believe that the project has been a great success as i set out to create two characters textured skinned and rigged and then animated in a short scene . As a whole the project has been an excellent learning curve as 90% of the learning has been done through tutorials, class mates and just experimenting with the software. im amazed at the fact that i was able to finish as last week i was bitching over the fact that i would never get it finished but through perseverance and a lot of coffee i managed to get everything done that i wanted to.
now seeing the process a a whole i can understand why areas of the process are divided up in to separate jobs as each area needs a lot of care and a lot of time in order to get the best possible results.
over the past 6 weeks i have gone from being scared of the controls and jobs in maya to now feeling really confident in what i am able to achieve with the program and im hungry to learn more :D

storyboards for the animation

so here are the simple brainwave boards i used to get the animation blocked out. i wanted to have an idea of what i was trying to achieve before setting out to do it

the animation

iv managed to get a nice short animation done involving the two characters the zoo keeper is gunna clean up the poo when the kid comes running in chasing a fly then slips on the poo simple.
im really surprised at how well i was able to use the rigs, but it just meant i had to be imaginative and start keying some of the bones in order to get the look i wanted. and i had great fun recording the voices and comping the sounds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCAks4oOi0Q

right there is the link to the vid if this doesnt work

Animating all day and probably all night .....

so i am probably a good half way through the animation but there is still lots to do i thought i would jus give a render to show progress, had loads of problems though such as the rigs not working exactly as i wanted them to so i have had to solve some issues. such as walking the characters have to walk on the spot then i have to move the master control to make them move,, not ideal if u ask me but it solved the problem .

rigged in a day

im amazed with the speed at which i managed to skin and rig willie billiams. it took just a day for me to create the skeleton skin it paint weigths add ikhandles and add set driven keys, which previously with wee eck took around 3 weeks

rigged

so Wee Eck is finished finally rigged with eye controls, hand controls ( spread, curl and individual digits) reverse foot lock and locators there is also a handle to control the sporran.

after all the problems iv had im really happy with the final result. this character has been a huge learning curve for me and i have learnt so much as before this character i had never modelled, skinned, textured or rigged my own character.

willie billiams

so the model for willie billiams is finished now. i am really happy with the way hesw ended up very simple yet does the job and the colours nicely compliment each other.

not only that the 2 characters i have created should look quite nice on screen together

Rigging

so its been a while since iv blogged but thats only cos iv been so busy working on all these projects so yeah basically i have now decided that the model of the zoo keeper is finished and i have been skinning the character which i have had soo many problems with.

so i started by following tutorials on how to create the skeleton which was simple enough and then bound it to the mesh, then steve suggested using roll bones to make it easier to rotate the bones so i went back detached the mesh and inserted roll bones.

iv had many issues with bones not behaving properly and so it has meant going back to the skeleton and tweaking things. i started painting the weights of my character and everything seemed to be going well until the next day wen i came back to work on the weights i couldnt use the paint weight toool ??!! so i spent 2 days tryin to figure out why, resetting tools searching through the hierachy and so on, not to mention trawling through the internet for answers. i was coming to the point of deleting prefs but i didnt want it to affect the rest of my work so that was a no go. in the end i decided to detach the mesh from the skeleton at the risk of losing the weights i had painted so i did this then noticed the neck joints werent working properly so i added more joints tweaked some stuff re-bound the mesh and hay presto the paint weight tool works again the only problem is it seems to have lost the weights that i painted so bback to painting weights for me