Cryptic Worlds

Lipsync assignment, I chose the chainsaw gag from the Simpsons. I decided to mod the premade rig to sorta look like Homer from The Simpsons.

I’ve been working on building up my portfolio for character design. So far I’ve been pretty slow at it as I’ve only gotten 2 fully modeled (minus a few accessories such as hair and cloth) characters done. My 2nd personal character is the 3D rendition of the Annulnali race from my Chronicles of Terrus universe. This one unlike the Vulkanian is skinned with 3DS Max’s Biped skeletal system which I’ve not really experimented with until the Advanced Animation class that I am taking this term, while parts of it are pretty cool others I don’t like as much such as some of the ways the bones rotate or turn as opposed to the standard IK Bone system I had utilized for the Vulkanian. It does however have a built in walk cycle but it yields rather weak and robotic looking motions so it really comes down to personal preference I guess. I’ve heard the industry loves the Biped system for humanoid characters but I’ve also heard that when hiring, they usually look for people who have used the systems walk cycle so maybe it’s better that I refine my standard skeletal systems and my walk cycles.

As I’m more focused on Character Design and Construction, it’s mainly my focus as of late but the progression of learning better techniques for character modeling have slowed me down a bit but I hope to start churning them out at a more steady pace so I have a stellar portfolio to show off my skills.

I’ve been meaning to post these for quite some time now but it’s slipped my mind along with many other things as of late so here they are for your viewing pleasure (or displeasure). If they play slow lower the quality.

Note: I havn’t figured out how to create loaders in ActionScript 2.0 or 3.0 yet so wait a bit before hitting play

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As part of the 4 part final for my Surface Techniques class we were tasked with taking a model of our own creation (preferably a non-organic object) and place it into a photograph with adequate lighting and the use of the matte/shadow material to make the object look like it was actually part of the scene. Well I decided to go with my Extreme Ghostbusters ghost trap model I created previously. I just threw on a reflection map, some soft lighting, added a trap switch (though I think the EGB trap was wireless in the cartoon lol) and angled it. I like how it came out but I guess it’s not entirely photo realistic, the way the trap casts a shadow seems to work but should it be softer? These are questions I’ll need to answer when I get a job in modeling.

So I’ve been basically working my ass off on this one so I could use it for a project due this coming monday. I can say that from unwrapping this model (which took me nearly a week x.X) I know how NOT to model a humanoid character, while I’ve cleaned up a lot of the triangles, 5 sided polygons (anything but 4 sided is a no no), stray vertices and overall shape of parts of the model there are still parts of it that need work but I’m at the point where this being my first humanoid character model ever it’s probably pretty good since without NURBS or Turbosmooth it clocks in at about 4,358 polygons which is a good number for a low poly model. Now I just finished putting together and implementing a basic rig for this model, next step: Skinning, this is where I apply the skin modifier where the mesh is directly manipulated by the IK Bone system that is the heart of the rig, and the most time consuming aspect of that process is adjusting the Envelope. This is what tells the modifier whether to warp a certain part for example an elbow to higher extent then say the mesh where the forearm is.

I created this blog mainly to show off my progress which I’ve been seriously slacking on but my inexperience with WordPress has kept me from posting videos and such since I’ve been too lazy to upload to my Youtube account. Yeah, that would be easier but when did I ever take the easy way out? I hope to get at least 4 more posts in before the month is over so keep an eye out.

We’ve been covering rigging and IK bone chains in Intermediate Animation and I’ve been dying to apply it to some of my own models, well it’s not as easy as I thought it’d be. For the most part the original model had some sloppy work on it compared to what I can churn out now so that needed to be fixed. I’ve corrected the odd neck, better spaced the eyes, added a bit more girth to his frame and fixed a slew of bad geometry but the hands are probably the biggest tweak.. well.. tweak is maybe not the right word because I amputated the old ones lol. So the hands are brand spankin new and I think they better convey the bulky nature of the characters race. Now all I gotta do is unwrap this thing and my prior attempts have left me knowing it’s gonna take a lot of patience and time.. can’t say I’m looking forward to it but it’s gotta be done if I wanna apply a texture to the model.

I’ve learned quite a bit since starting my Surface Techniques class back in October. About a week ago our midterm was due for the class which involved texturing a gas station scene. This model was of questionable construction in my personal opinion with some awkward additions to the mapping and the overall design of the structures. One thing we were not allowed to do was alter any geometry in it so I had to use maps to my advantage. While this project doesn’t look as amazing as I had hoped it would I’m still proud of it, I was basically used as an example of what an A looked like in the class lol. That made my day.

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This term we have a History of Animation class, it’s one of the few academic style courses I’ve had in the program but for the most part is mainly a course where we watch cartoons from the many studios that have come and gone in the history of animated features. We only recently covered the Van Beuren Studio which besides it’s rather lackluster Felix the Cat cartoons I had never heard of before provided less then memorable fare. The stories were pretty plain and character development was practically non-existent. I was wondering when the toons we watched would suddenly be funny. Practically never. This is my general feeling for the lousy stuff that has been released in recent years like the awfully shallow flash based cartoons from Canada such as 6Teen(ugh), Total Drama Island(wretch), Total Drama Action(hmph), and this even worse one about surfing(hurls). I think all those studios still around should take a course like the one I’m taking and see what was good and what wasn’t.