Adding the final touches

After a long day of working through my rigging, skinning and animating, I have now managed to do all three. Only issue is, trying to work with the clothes and skin wrapping them.Unfortunately with many attempts, I came to the conclusion that skin wrapping the outfit wasn't an option. I was told that because the geometry of my model had too many polygons on it and the clothes had the same issue so the clothes would not be able to skin wrap properly while the body is moving. It was dissapointing news, but I had to move forward to complete this brief. So instead I had to take three beauty shots of the model as it was before I had to strip the character down for animating. After that I then had to animate the walk cycle for my character and animate the camera movements as she walks along. Finally all I had to do then was set up my render settings for film and sit and wait till it was finished rendering and bring it into Adobe After Effects to be exported as a MP4. I am disappointed to say the least that I couldn't get my full character to animate because I was looking forward to seeing the outcome of how she would look in her outfit but I am satisfied knowing that my model and my animation show my uderstanding of what I have learnt during this model,

Building the bones, structure and skin

Now that I have completely finished the modelling to my character, now it's time to rig my character up. To do this I have to build the bones for the CATRIG, add a skin modifier to my body, put on weights on the skin to make sure it doesn't look too distorted and animate it. I have already built on the bones for my CATRIG, surprisingly it wasn't as bad as I thought it was gonna be. But now the difficult part was now having to add the skin and weigh the different parts of the body so as it didn't go badly out of shape whenever I move the legs or arms. I have started to make an attempt at it but so far it is proving difficult. I hope to be able to try and manage to get this right.

Clothes Modelling

After finally finishing the body for the model, I have near finished the modelling of the clothes. At first I wasn't too sure on how to start creating clothes that would fit around the body but after taking some time to think it over, I was able to think of an idea of how to build the tops, boots, skirt, bow and accessories. For the tops I had to mould around a copy of the torso and chest, the boots started from a plane, to manipulated vertices to extruding into the shape of the shoe, the skirt a tube that has bee extruded, chamfered (alot) and tweeked a bit ad the accessories either a line shape extruded or capsule shapes. Texturing the clothes for my character wasn't that much of a task but then again I wouldn't be the best at unwrapping. But overall I am pleased with the outcome of the outfit for my model.

Questioning about Rigging.

Today, for one of our classes, we looked into a modifier called CATRIG which is a automatic walkcycle for rigged characters. We generally are supposed to build a skeleton from the CATRIG that connects to the platform and from that it automatically walks in place or walks along. I found this task quite enjoyable because I didn't know what there was this kind of option in 3D Max. We had to use a skeleton that was supplied to us by the CATRIG and modify the body parts to create our own character walkcycle. This method seemed very helpful towards our project for whenever I need to animate my character further on.

Adding that voluptuous body

I have now started to build the body, I began with using a cylinder and shaping a torso, breasts, stomach, shoulders and neck from that one shape. The top half on the body wasn't as difficult as I thought it was going to be, but creating the arms, hands legs and feet were slightly more tricky trying to get the proportions. Though nothing was more difficult than making the head and the facial features because I wanted to try and get it perfect. But I am relieved that I have nearly finished the modelling for the body. the Next step will be making and modelling the hair for the head, eye brows, and eyes.

Progressing just a little bit

Over the easter break, have slowly but surely started working on my model. I have decided to attempt to make a model of yuna from Final Fantasy X which a playstation consol game. I have always loved this character because even though she is already in animated 3D form she had amazing textures, a stunning outfit and beautiful facial features. I wanted to give myself a challenge and create her in 3D Max. So What I have done so far is that I have drawn out a character template to show what I would be working with, with different poses of her body and head. I also started making the head which has taken some time to start and finish. Here is my character template and a few screenshots of my progress with photoshop:

Intro to Character Design/ Project 2

Today we were given a task to design a character to our second brief. We had the option of either designing a model of ourselves, designing a model for Design at Magee designing a 3D model of animated or cartoon character, or create your own character from scratch. I decided to go with turning a familiar animated character into 3D. I want to take up on this challenge because I want to try and push myself to see how my 3D skills have developed but yet scepitcal because of how character aimation isn't my strong point in 3D Max. I will have to think long and hard about which would be a challenging but suitable character for my final 3D project for second year.