shot update

rigged and somewhat textured second character

So here he is. Much better with him posed a bit, doncha think?

Second character - first texture pass

First texture pass on the second character. The eyes will illuminate.

He ended up much for skeletal than I'd planned. The initial design wasn't working the way I'd wanted, so I adjusted for the alient effect I was looking for. Think I have it. Legs might be a little busy.

Will try and at least partially rig him tonight. Want to have him posed before I do more texturing...

Bambi reference

For character movement (don't to a silly evansence song):

Textured Character - 1st Pass

1st pass on the textured character. Have keyable controls for the filament incandescence. I still need to add dirt maps to everything, but think this is a good place to start.

Pipeline

I'm about to start on texturing and setting cameras. The idea is to have the textured rigged character and the environment referenced into a seperate file so I can work on lights and textures as I animate.

The second character will have to wait a bit...

Environment model

The scene is essentially modeled. I have about 2/3 of the textures done from last semester, so hopefully that doesn't slow down the render too much. On my home system, with the character geo included, its a 25 second render. With textures and lights, I'm hoping it stays below 2 minutes. This is about double what it'll be at school.

Figure about an hour to render a second and if I do the renders while I sleep I should be ok.

Here it is:

Spline IK and scene

So looked into using the spline IK for the arms. Wouldn't work. I'm sure there's some solution, but talking with people at the labs can't think of one that wouldn't involve vast amounts of code. So I think it would be a lot of time spent without much return on the final product. We'll see if I feel that way in two months.

Working on the scene now. Have most of it modeled, and have a ton of textures already. Just need to put it together in a way that won't kill me in render time. I'm trying to use procedural textures wherever I can since they're resolution independent and won't require large tiffs.

Hoping to start laying out cameras this weekend, and also start modeling the 2nd character.

Want to have the creature textured by end of Friday, along with most of the scene (at least have all the necessary geo in place).

Posed Creature

For your viewing pleasure.

Rigging update

So the rig is essentially done.

One problem I've run into is the IK on the arms. Because I need to limit the rotates on some joint for the movement to work, the IK doesn't work. Researching it, this is an known issue. The solver locks when I disallow some rotations. I can leave the joints moving at full range, but that can create obvious problems with geo intersecting.

I managed to get the whip hand working using spline IK. Works pretty well, but I'd like to to a little bit of animating on it to make sure it'll work. But I have hope.

It works like a tentacle, but doesn't look like it'll allow me to wrap it around things. This will likely need to be a one off animation if I even do it.

I've considered using spline IK for the arms, but the end effector seems to move in the tests I've run.

Because IK isn't going to be used much in the final piece, I may end up just adjusting the entire rig as necessary for the one or two shots that I need it for.