Thats it

Well I think thats about all the updates from the end of term now. Overall I suppose I'm not too happy with how this year has gone on my part. I kind of feel like I've spent my whole year rigging and not much of anything else; this is mostly a result of certain technical challanges getting the better of me. This lead to me holding up pretty much every group I worked with, especially Red Rock, which was supposed to be my primary group but I only ended up joining them half way through the last term, leaving Nate and Jak to do most of the project on their own. Bloody rigging... In my defense though I could find almost no help at all on these technical problems, so I took it upon myself to write my own tutorial lest I never forget..
I was definately hoping to get more out of the third year, but I do have some sense of accomplishment from it.. I remember looking back at the first year, using Moom for the first time and setting myself the goal of one day being able to rig like that; today I feel like I'm not actually that far off, which must be worth something.

Animation

Ok, im terrible at animating and I generally hate it but I thought I'd have a go at animating the last shot. Lonato and Nahil are fishing together having bonded over the storm. Lonato tries to cast his line, but has become un-practiced as a result of his old cushy lifestyle, and ends up throwing his rod into the river by accident.
So far it looks aweful, but its kind of getting there.

particle effects

carrying on with the updates from the last few weeks of the project, heres a few samples of some particle experiments I've been working on for the waterfall mist.













As you can probably tell it hasn't been going very well.. this is my first time touching particles, and to be honest its a bit late for me to learn and pull off something good as well- that said however, the basics are not as complex as I origonally presumed. Getting it to look right will probably require a lot more though

scalable ik fk switch

lonato rig

for the first time since second year, i had a proper bash at creating a facial interface- this one is much better than willie billiams, utilising more blendshapes and an interface that is representative of his head. I modelled about a quatre of the blendshapes myself, with Nate doing most of them while I finished the rig itself.

This rig is the first one I've succeeded in making fully scalable, and also has an IK/FK switch. It wasn't too much trouble to get any of this working, but overall I think the spine setup used for Jed is better as you can use both fk and ik controls at the same time- with a switch you cannot. Suprisingly though I was unexpectedly held up by weighting issues on account of the seperate head geometery coming apart at the seems. It took me a long time to work out an acceptable solution, which essentially involved going into the component editor and matching up the exact weight values for each vertex individually.
Unfortunatly it still doesn't look as good as it should- to avoid this in future the whole combined mesh should probably be used for the blendshape models, as I only found out recently you can delete all the blendshapes once linked up and it will still work fine.

Textured objects

Heres a couple of renders for the fishing pole and the bed- I got the textures from CGtextures.com, though made some colour adjustments and applied them to the UV maps. For the matress I applied a different texture (rather than the colour texture) to the bump layer to give it creases and folds

House texture test