Wednesday 23 December 2009

Environment complete on my side

Just completed doing the environments, hope it looks good. If there is anything you guys want me to add just let me know while i continue to rig the ninja

Tuesday 22 December 2009

Single chain IK sover

As the rig develops i gain further knowledge on the tools which are needed to full take advantage of the characters rig. I thought i might as well give up a little summery on the information i found on using inverse kinematics over normal joint orientation, plus this could be a little guide in to using the single chain Ik solver. OK what i did first in order for me to familiarise myself with the IK handles was to produce a mock test on a test rig which represents as the bones inside the leg. To make is easier i will play blast the video of the rig without any IK handles to that of one with IK handles.



As you can see from the above video as i move and rotate the joints you will see the knee and ankle joints also move, there are no bends occurring when they are to
.


After i add the IK handle, it keeps joint on the first cube as i rotate or move the hip joint. But if i pull to far away from the hip then ankle will pull away from the IK handle

Saturday 19 December 2009

Adjusting the orientation of the rig

Just finnished of tweaking off the joints of the ninja rig, i made sure all the verticle joints such as the spine, pelvis, head and leg were having the z-axis pointing towards the same side. Also the ninjas hand rotational points were not in the correct position and is something which i also sorted out. Pictures below


Little message for the rigger

Ok this is towards Dan and Josh as you guys are also going to take part in rigging. The key element to rigging is to have a proper and functional joint orientation. Having the proper local rotation axis for each joint is crucial when setting up and animating a character. Basicly each joint has a local roation axis that defines how the joint will react to transformation. For most part of a character i found out that the default orientation in fine. By using orientation you will ensure that all local axes of the new joints are aligned with the bones that follow.

Friday 18 December 2009

Rigging update

I’m quite surprised to say that I really enjoy rigging at the moment, unless i encounter something which is really mind juggling then I’ll take back my words. So far I produced the fully body rig for the Ninja character, it’s looking good at the moment. The next stages I’m heading towards are the joint orientation and the inverse kinematics, once I get full understanding of these techniques I will the move on towards the leg, arm and spine set up. I will post some image below of the rig so far


So far so good

Just being rigging over the past few days now and everything is going all good. I’m not yet finished with the rig as i still need to do joint orientation and inverse kematics, i just did a little test by binding the rig to the ninjas body to see if the movement are up to the standards. I think it’s going good so far but ill post some pic with him doing some little movements. Also on my blog i have the full body rig, not complete though

Thursday 17 December 2009

Hitman Character switch

While developing the Hitman character, questioned whether having both me and Josh develop the characters in two different programmes would result in unpleasant effects when animating or rigging. As I mentioned on the group blog, i imported the Hitman character which was modelled in Zbrush in to Maya just to get an understanding of how tall the Hitman would be in comparison to the Ninja. The first problem I discovered would was that the topology was not similar to that of a model done in Maya, in order for me to fix this problem i would have to re-topologize the whole mesh of the Hitman. If do decide to do that it would be similar to me starting from scratch and modelling the Hitman again. The second problem I found was that the clothes were not extruding out of the Hitman body without the body deforming. I don’t blame Zbrush for these problems; it’s the way I approached modelling the character in Zbrush without knowing the correct pipeline for moving between Zbrush and Maya when modelling the characters. Hopefully through time I will learn the correct method of moving meshes across two different software packages. I know it’s not impossible as the industry use these pipeline everyday when given project to complete, this is something that I would have to look in to my own time. And hopefully when i do feel confident enough to fully understand the method of modelling in Zbrush and Maya, I would then say I would be able to model any character given to me.

Wednesday 16 December 2009

Plan of action

Ok at this stage i have kind of left the Hitman character to one side for now, just wanting to let you know im going to produce a test rig on Joshes ninja model, hopefuly i will get a better understanding of the Rigging tool as i go along. I should have the test done soon so i should hopefuly show the progress. If everything seems to be going good then im gona ask Josh if i can then start to fully rig the ninja character, who knows if josh dosent mind i could help out with the rigs of the other characters

Tuesday 15 December 2009

Concern on High res Enviornment

At the moment me and Sam haven’t really decided on a max poly count for the outdoor environment, we decided to model everything that needed to be model which includes all the little details, and if worse comes to worse when rendering we need to go over the file and look for some unnecessary edges which can be deleted. I don’t know whether the high details on the environments will cause any problems for Spencer when he comes to texturing, and if it does that something I’m going to have to sort out at that time. Our group is going to go into uni tomorrow to catch up and I’m hoping that I will be able to get the master file of the environment off Sam so then i will be able to place what I’ve modelled in the same file Sam has his models in. If I can get the any lasting changes done on the environment I will then be able to concentrate more on the Hitman character which i will try have completed by December, not to mention i have to start rigging to, so that’s another reason for me to finish the character model first.


Hitman development

It’s been about a week and a half since I started modelling the Hitman character, and everything seems to be going as expected. Me and were given to project of modelling the characters, i took on the Hitman and Josh took on both the target and the Ninja. As Josh had previously modelled characters in Maya it was fair to put him in charge of the character development process, whenever I would in doubt about modelling the Hitman a certain way, Josh would be a good person to ask for advice as I would be modelling from his character designs. As Josh modelling was produced in Maya i started developing the Hitman in Zbrush, both programs have their advantage and disadvantage. At this stage I could say I’m about 90% complete with the modelling of the Hitman, the only issue that may arise is on the clothes, which can be created in Zbrush but I can’t seem to get the hang of the mesh extraction tool. If worse comes to worse i would have to import the model in Maya and Model the Hitmans clothes as a separate geometry and parent it to the hitman body. I have kind of taken a break from the Hitman and concentrated on modelling the environment. Below is an image of the hitman character so far

Friday 11 December 2009

Progress update part 2

Ok during the start of the Christmas holidays i started creating the hitman in zbrush, been continuing up to point where i needed assistance from Josh on how he wanted his character looking. Wednesday the whole whacked team came into uni to catch on the progress and help out if needed. Sam wanted to show me the layout for the environment where the apartment and motel were going to be, but he had forgotten to bring in his memory stick. So Wednesday was a day for me to catch up and tweak more on the hitman character, so far everything is going good no hiccups yet. Later that day Sam sent me the layout file through email and i got cracking on producing one half of the environment while Sam does the other half. Below is a picture my side of the environment so far, not yet completed though

Thursday 10 December 2009

Inspiration for modelling the motel or apartment

Well today I have been modelling the apartment while listening to the resident evil 2 soundtrack. For some odd reason it was inspiring me to model the environment similar the rundown apartment in resident evil. Here is a picture of the idea