Cryptic Worlds

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.

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 handed in my production guide final for my Scriptwriting course today and I can tell you what a relief.. I finished about 69 storyboards which was about 207 individual drawings, it’s a very time consuming process. I have a new found respect for the people in the industry who produce storyboards for feature length films because my storyboard were only for a 25-30 min short and it took me quite awhile. Whats cool is I now have a working script, storyboards, character and environment concepts if I decided to turn it into an actual animated piece. By the way, try out a program called Celtx. It’s a script writing application and I can say it made it very easy to write a professional looking script.

I’m rather excited about my overall progress with 3D Studio Max 2009. For our final project in my Introduction to Modeling course we were to create a cartoon character. I chose to create a model of one of the characters I developed for a fighting game concept and space opera I’ve been working on for quite some time on and off. If I can pick up some more XNA, maybe I will use these in an actual game!