I've paired up with Fran, and here is the link to her blog if you want to check it out. http://mortefran.wordpress.com/
We've also began working on our going live project. Which is really awesome and time consuming lately, but unfortunately I can not talk much more about it then that. Which has been a mental struggle for wanting to update, since all I think about posting is about the going live project. But anyways, I'll talk more about my other stuff for now.
For class we've been practicing reflecting on our work. Also how to present our future work in an academic style presentation. I've been looking up Color Psychologists to hopefully interview to get a psychological view on color and not just an artistic view on color. Once I have that info I can hopefully before our presentation in late March get in a focus group or two with the characters created by Fran, so that we can make a more informed decision on their final color pallets.
We've also been having a blast with our instructor Sang-Yu, he's been showing us rigging in Maya, and while I use to dread rigging I'm finding I actually really enjoy it. Plus, the feeling you get when you finish a successful Rig and it works like you want it to, it's such an amazing feeling.
This was a full rigged simplified female character we made throughout the classes with Sang-Yu. We were first given a prerigged character to mess around and create some amusing poses. Then we started with just the character, with zero rigging done and started from there as a class to rig the character. The differences you can see are in the controllers, like the arrow beneath the character. The next two photos are of the character given to us before we started learning to do it ourselves.
Some more fun with the rigged character. It's amazing the expressions you can create with a basic rig. Just makes it so much more mind boggling what you can do with more advanced rigs.
These were basically end of day one pictures. Some close ups of the hand rig and how you can test out if it is moving correctly before skinning the rig to the model. You start with the spine, and then do one leg and one arm and you can then mirror those sides onto the other side without needing to individually rig them.
Once fully rigged, putting controllers, like seen above on the fingers really helps with the animation process. So now you do not have to select each individual joint, and only need to select something outside of the body to control it.
Next we're going to start working on skin weights and blender shapes. By weighting the skin to certain joints, you can control the look of the squash and stretch happening in the characters. Blender shapes are basically taking say the head, modeling different expressions and then setting keys that allow you to go between those expressions. That way you do not have to individually animate them every time you want your character to express a different emotion.
Personal Project wise, since I've recently switched to combining with Fran I have not gotten too much done. Fran got me some environment images just this weekend and I've only got a base model begun. Here are the sketches she's given me:
And this is what I've created in Maya so far:
So basically the walls, the entrance to the bunker, and the beds is all I've gotten so far. Keeping it plain and simple for now then we can go through and figure out stylistic choices and edits.
Well.... That was a lot of info, I'm really happy with were I'm at so far with this project, and by buying a Cintiq Companion I don't have to be tied down by the labs computers or the hours so that's def going to improve my productivity. Fran and I are discussing a production time table later and some other things. I will keep in better contact I swear!
