Female Turnaround

Female process

The Modelling process

 The modeling was completed very quickly, the lack of legs on the model gave me a huge time advantage.

UV

Rigging

Rigging this character was a little easier than the male simply because she has no legs. I didn't want to rig this character with an imply leg underneath, because when skinning the joints it will become problematic. so I did this -

I created a stumped leg, this way I still get the IK leg without the hassle of a foot.

The rig is very simple, but it does the job.

Blendshapes

The blendshapes for this character was more successful than the male, I think this is because I modeled this character a little better and by this point I had some experience working with blendshapes.

Skinning

The skinning was just as difficult as before but the face was very easy which I was very grateful for!

Pose

I picked this pose because it is the one we see her do at the end of the animation, it gives her a nice flirtation characteristic. 

Male Gnome Turnaround

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

Re_texturing and Re-painting

The project has now become more focused on the design aspect of the characters, so I have gone back to re do some texturing because I wasn't happy with what I had. This time I have taken the model in mudbox to try and achieve a better stone texture.

I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. Time to paint. 

I did the painting in Mudbox to just because I find it easier and faster. I wanted to make the painting look like it had been done at a cheap standard which made the paint overlap in areas. This become more difficult than expected because I had to determine how much overlap was working and what wasn't.

The blue on the beard and the white on the shirt is to give the impression that the paint brush couldn't fit under chin. 

Male gnome - where I'm at - modelling, texturing and rigging

The modelling and texturing is finished - he has simple bold colours with a slight fracture texture to make it look like it is made of stone. 

The rigging has been very entertaining so far, I'm learning new things that gives me a huge amount of freedom  when animating him. I'm not finished yet but this is what I have.

I am most proud of the spine rig and the arm rigs - mainly because the spinal rig can twist and twist without buckling. For example the image below shows a 1200 degree twist. 

Im proud of the arms because they allow me to switch between IK and FK animations with the flick of a switch

FK

IK

Modelling the Gnome

This is the model so far

All he needs is some eyebrows and some tweaks and then he'll be ready