Rigging with CAT

Today we refreshed our memories on rigging. I used a base human rig and resized and reshapped it acordingly to fit the ogre mesh. I then used the weight tool to tweak the verts that seemed out of place (about 4 hours work with much mind wandering) to make it move more fluently. I then applied a CATmotion run as the animation and redered it out.

Mudbox

Today I brought my unwrapped ogre into Mudbox to try texturing and painting it. I am fairly new to mudbox and I love its ability to make what was a rather plain model, look really good and detailed with only a few minutes work. The paint tool is a helpful way to add colour to your model, using layers, opacity and blending modes, you can get a very similar detail style as using photoshop. I find this method more helpful as you see exactly what its looks like in 3D as apposed to editing in photoshop in 2D.

Oh. and its also good fun to play with. MY OGRE HAS A BEARD!

UVW mapping (again)

UVW MAPPING!
woo.
LOOK, LOOK AT THIS !

YEAH! UVW MAPPING! BADASS

It's an ogre. Yes, thats right. An ogre. Not just an ogre. this is a CHECKERED ogre. very rare as they were hunted for their skin to make chessboards.


But seriously.
Today we did UVW mapping again on your entire character. We split the model into different ID's (the head, arms, hands, legs and torso we seperated) to allow me to unwrap them. I used a new tool called "peel" for the head and torso (it does all the work for you!) and used cylindrical mapping for the legs, arms and hands. The hands require more precise UVW work, which I began working on, but didnt get round to completing.

JUMP (que van halen)

I animated a CAT rig to jump off a box using autokey animation. This took alot of tweaking to make it fluent enough for me to be happy with. Its was about 3 hours work.

Animation constraints

Lee gave us 10 minutes to add 4 constraints in max. I added a path constrain (a teapot moving along a spline) a look constraint (to make a cube "look at" a dummy) a link constraint (to make a torus move alongside a dummy) and a position constraint (to make a tube follow a dummy).

Online tutorial

I followed an online tutorial from www.tysonibele.comto make an animation using particel systems in max to make a teapot explode. This is what I ended up with.

Modelling 101

To see what our modelling skills were like Lee gave us an ogre template to try and model from. We used simple low poly box modelling to get the shape of the belly and torso and were then left to our own devices in order to finalise the model. I struggled with the "moobs" but managed to keep the typlogy quite clean and maintained a good edge flow. Here's my finished model, that will eventually be unwrapped, and rigged.