INTERACTIVE :: 21/11/16 - Character Animations

Over the past week I've been slowly working on the animations for the moth character, with varying degrees of success.  Currently I'm looking up tutorials for how to do a convincing walk cycle and death animation, as these are the last two animations I need to create to place in the game.  At this point we're going with a one-hit kill format similar to classic games like the original Super Mario in order to save time.  Hopefully it will only take me today and tomorrow to get these animations done, and spend the rest of the week writing up the flavor text and drawing introduction images for the beginning of the game while Patrick puts everything into Unity.

Here are the other animations I've made for the project so far, in playblast form:

Attack:

Idle:

Jump:

INTERACTIVE :: 16/11/16 - Controls

Took me longer than i wanted to get to this point, but controls have been added and completed for the moth rig

INTERACTIVE :: 13/11/16 - Moth Rigging

Most of the week has been spent rigging and painting my moth's skin weights to make sure that it moves and flexes correctly.  With the model as simple as it is, figuring out the skin weights has not been too difficult.

Skin weights have been mirrored so that both sides are even.

Over the weekend, I made a quick animation to showcase what the rig can do!  Due to its tiny limbs, however, it is somewhat difficult to show the moth doing things that require extensive stretching of its arms and legs.  it was only after I finished rigging that I also noticed I positioned the joints of its arms wrong, so making them rotate can be a bit of an issue at times.

At this stage, all I need to do is add controls and then I can begin animation!  I may require a refresher course on how those work, but it shouldn't take too long.

INTERACTIVE :: 02/11/16 - Rigging Moth

The past couple of days I have spent trying to refamiliarize myself with the rigging aspect of 3D modelling.  The moth feels like it will be a lot easier to rig than the model I created last year, as it has very simple arms/legs with no fingers.  I honestly only wanted to spend a couple of days on getting the rig together, but unfortunately, personal issues have arisen and I'm a little behind on where I would like to be with it.

There aren't really too many progress shots to show so far - I've created all the joints and put them together in a hierarchy, ready to bind to the skin once I confirm with another group member that everything is connected the way that its supposed to be.

Also, while messing around yesterday, me and the rest of the team accidentally ended up creating a more appealing moth, as well as creating a basis for the 'sage' character by being silly and messing around with the character's fur parts.

The moth actually looks quite cute with fluffy pants, even if the 'pants' are just a rotated version of the fluffy collar around its neck.

As for the sage, we found that by increasing the size of the fur collar and shifting it up, we could create a pretty convincing beard.

This one was just for fun.  It really looks like a sheep now.

19/10/15 - RIGGING SUBMISSION

SUBMISSION FOR ASSIGNMENT 3 - PART 1

As always, if the video doesn't work, it can be found on my tumblr!

Rendering.....

Please standby for Assignment hand-in.......

19/10/15 - Keying and Skinweights

Been trying to finish up the last of my model for Monday submission, but over the weekend I came to realize that painting skinweights and making the rig do what i want it to is a lot harder than one would first believe.

I gave myself two days to complete at least the keying and skinning, intending to do the camera today, but much to my dismay, keying the model took an entire day, and though i spent all of yesterday doing skinweights, I wasn't able to complete everything I wanted, and both my knees and elbows were looking pretty bad.  I intended to have the character bend down to touch his toes, but had to change it last minute as bending was more or less impossible without completely deforming the geometry.  Even getting him to raise his arms up to the sides of his head was difficult - the character's forearms kept warping and deforming.

So today has been spent trying to fix the problems I have had - repainting my elbows and my back, fixing my knees and re-keying the frames so that my poses were better suited for the current weights painted on my rig.  The movements in it are very simple - lifting and lowering the feet to display IK, rolling the shoulders, bending the arms, flexing the fingers and giving a big thumbs up along with playing over my four expressions.  I'm still having issues with my elbows that I'm hoping to tackle after the lunch period is over.

As you can see, my right elbow is more or less successful, but getting the left to match it has been incredibly hard.  I can't use the mirror skinweights tool, as it seems every time I use it it seems to destroy another part of my mesh.

Over the course of the last two days, I've been using a lot of Hammer Weights, and its been a wonderful tool for fixing giant spikes or large bumps that appear in my mesh.  I feel like I wouldn't be as far as I am now without it.

Over the weekend I also changed my FK arm controls to IK ones and today I was told I'd done it wrong and that my rig would be more effective with FK.  I've put the FK back on my arms, but now I need to redo all the keys and skinweights that I had on them and that is somewhat stressful.

Going to try and finish this up and hopefully put a video up soon.

13/10/15 - Blendshapes preparation

There are a lot of things I need to adjust shapes for in my animation sequence, so I'm just going to list them here to get my thoughts in order.

In the process of the animation, Embry makes a few expression changes.  Most notably:

- Surprise/Awe
- Sadness
- That squinty look you get when you're about to cry.

Bits of him that need to move are:

- His eyes:  moving to either side and up/down
- Both eyebrows - going up in surprise/angled and to the sides for sorrow
- His mouth - making O shapes and D: shapes
- Eyelids: opening and closing and widening.

Therefore the parts of him that are going to be affected are:

• Default dummy:
  - left eyebrow - neutral (default)
  - right eyebrow - neutral (default)
  - left eye - centered (default)
  - right eye - centered (default)
  - body mesh - eye sockets normal (default)
  - body mesh - upper eyelid open (default)
  - body mesh - lower eyelid open (default)
  - body mesh - mouth neutral (default)
  - body mesh - mouth closed (default)
• Dummy 1
  - left eyebrow - lifting
  - right eyebrow - lifting
  - left eye - looking left
  - right eye - looking left
  - body mesh - mouth turned down
  - body mesh - eye socket wide
• Dummy 2
  - left eyebrow - lowering
  - right eyebrow - lowering
  - left eye - looking right
  - right eye - looking right
  - body mesh - mouth open
• Dummy 3
  - left eyebrow - rotating left in a / shape
  - right eyebrow - rotating left in a / shape
  - left eye - looking up
  - right eye - looking up
  - body mesh - upper eyelid closed
• Dummy 4
  - left eyebrow - rotating right in a \ shape
  - right eyebrow - rotating right in a \ shape
  - left eye - looking down
  - right eye - looking down
  - body mesh - lower eyelid lifted

I may remove the blink if things cut a little too close to submission date - seeing as Embry is a golem he technically doesn't need to blink at all.  But I think it would add a little more realism to him if it was kept in.

Here are some WIPs from over the day:

12/10/15 - Rigging complete!

The past week has been dedicating to finishing my rigging and today I was finally successful!  The process of constraining and orienting things was really easy after having to do it for every single joint, just time consuming.  What really frustrated me the most over this whole thing was rigging up my hand over the weekend and then forgetting to bring it to school on my flash drive today.  On the bright side, I got both hands and my hair rigged up a lot more neatly wit less time spent trying to figure things out.

Here is the rig in its entirety:

Most of it is joined with the basic orient constraints that we learned about the other week,

Character's legs and hair both have IK controls on them which will make it easier to animate the character walking and give him flexible hair movement.

His hands are perhaps the most complex part of the rig and took the longest time to set up - After orienting each joint in the fingers, I used two driven keys to adjust the curl for each finger, as well as a control for curling all of the fingers at the same time.

As evident in the last image though, I really need to start painting my skin weights and working on my blend shapes and will probably spend this week doing both of those.  But in the meantime, my outliner is feeling very organized.