Something new

I’m still alive, work has taken most of my time for the past months, but it is slowing down, so I had time for personal projects again!

So this is a character that I started this weekend, and that I will hopefully be able to rig and animate soon.
I’ll use this guy to practice on my animation and to establish a pipeline with Blender, Gimp and Unity to eventually make a small game.

Personal facial rigging exercise

Saturday, I looked for good topology head models, found one in the gnomon workshop’s freebee section.
I then modeled the interior of the mouth for the model, the tongue and the eyes.
Sunday, I made most of the morphers, skinned the rig and setup the eyes.
Today, I created the remaining morphers, linked everything to controllers and began cleaning the rig.

The rig is a hybrid (part skinned bones, part morphers) all driven by an intuitive interface.
Bones were used for the brows and the jaw, everything else is deformed by morphers.
There are still some tweaks needed on a few morphers and I might need to limit some deformations around the mouth, but overall its working nicely.

Head and teeth models from Gnomon Workshop: http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/category/202/​

Music: Stamina, Venetian Snares

Everything else made by me.

Some of you might have already seen this

Low Poly Game character wip3

the textures are done (512 diffuse with alpha)
closeup screenshot :

note that you will never see the character this close in-game, in fact the character wont even be 512 pixels tall!

here is a video where I test the rig:

next up, animation cycles and Unity integration.

low poly game character wip 2

(almost final) texture

I still need to tweak it, mostly small details and seams corrections

low poly character wip

This week I began to work on a low poly game character
The character weight 2000 tris and is UVed on a 512*512 texture map

I’m still working on the textures. Today I did most of the upper body, most of the sword and blocked colors for the rest of the model (way too dark atm).
note: what you see is not the final texture and will need some more polishing.

here is a wireframe/silhouette screen grab:

and here the texture wip

Rig testing

Testing the rig to see if there is any tweaks required.

New character

This is what I was up to this month:

It has IK/FK controls, bendy limbs, stretchable limbs, auto twisting bones for the forearms and the thighs and the twist can be adjusted for the whole limb (twisting from the shoulder to the wrist)

I was testing the rig today, looking for undesired behavior(s) that would require some tweaks before I animate him.

Lucy Thunder WIP 04

I have posted updates of the character everywhere but here… this should have been the first place updated

*click on the image to see a bigger version*

As you can see on the picture above I have changed the colors of her suit. Lighter and brighter colors were more suiting for this character, she doesn’t look like a UPS employee anymore and more like one of the “good guys”. She also look more sci-fi, which is a good thing as I plan to set the story in a sci-fi setting.

I was finally able to get a render style that I liked and the best part is that it doesn’t take long to render. So for the animations, quick renders = lot of time saved. If i mix this with my motion blur method, I will be able to get great visuals without take too much time to render it out!

Earlier I was planning to get her into Zbrush, turns out I decided not to. I didn’t really needed a normal map and with the render method that I am using, I wouldn’t be able to see the normal map.

As far as rigging goes there are some polishing to do (I want add some more animator friendly controllers and a GUI for the facial animation)
Its almost finished!

The next steps on the list are:
-Model/texture/rig her ship
-Model/texture the environment
-Model/texture/rig the bad guys

I’m not sure yet if I will do these in that order.

Lucy Thudner WIP 03

Some changes made to the model
new colors (still temporary)
and still testing the lighting

next:
-unwrap the new pieces
-normal maps for the character and most of the pieces