Male Gnome process Update

Hey guys its been awhile since I have put up a post, so I'm going to just put up what I have in terms of the male gnome in one post. I will do this for the fish and the female.

Here is the little guy full textured, I had a few problems with the resolution of the textures, this forced me to use a whole UV layout space for each individual piece of the gnome. It made things a little fiddly but I'm very happy with this final layout. I managed to get the impression of flaking paint and the clay coming through, this is an idea that I had from the beginning of the project, so it was very important for me to have this effect on the character.

I have learnt a lot of rigging tips for this project via Alan's tutorials and the tutorials on DIGITAL TUTORS - I originally had a quite advanced rig set up (image below), this had unbreakable spine that could twist with no end, I had IKFK switching arms and some other toys on there. However I soon got to a problem in the skinning and one problem lead to another until it just broke and then nothing worked.

So I decided to go with a more simplistic rig - at this stage the arms are only FK with of course so squash and stretch enabled. This is because I was now only thinking about posing rather than animation.

Blend shapes

The blend shapes were a very interesting part of the pipeline and they were new for me. I created my blendshapes with my old expression sheets in mind. 

Unfortunately they didn't come out as cartoony as the drawings but I still like them.

The skinning process was very problematic for me, mainly because of how fiddly it was and how many time to had to go back a forward. It was very time consuming. The final result wasn't perfect but it was okay for posing. 

Posing the character

I went with this pose because it is the establishing shot in the animation, it shows how the character is feeling and it opens it up to the story that will eventually be made. I added a small piece of the set As well to enhance the pose. 

I will put the turnaround on a separate post