second eye model

Here is another eyeball model, I was just going to use a normal sphere with a ramp texture on it, as all the tutorials I looked at were a bit confusing, or ultra realistic, which I wasnt looking for. But I found a good tutorial on utube so I thought id give it another try. I like it a lot, although when I uv mapped the texture on the iris the is a slight seam, which im sure will be fixable somehow. Here are the stages of the eye making process.

I like it a lot better then the original one I modeled a while ago, and I am happy with the way this model has turned out.

Painting Weights

Well on thurseday I re-did most of the previous days work because of the problem with the foot. Today I finished painting the weights, which I found slightly easier then excluding the verts as it was easier for me to see were the model was overlapping in influence. I painted the head and mouth sack, neck and the fingers on the left hand, I didnt do the right hand because you can mirror painted joints in the same way you can mirror half a model.

It was also decided on thurseday that I shouldnt bother paint weighting the feet as the monkey doesnt pick anything up with the toes, he just walks normally, and seeing as the feet now work perfectly for walking. it would just take up time weighting them when there not actually going to be used for anything else. so here are some pics of the paint weighting. now hopefully I can move onto the facial rig, and be animating soon.

serious problem with the toes

I finished applying the paint weights to the model last night, and when I brought it into the studio to get it ok'd by my tutor Paul, everything seemed to be going smoothly and moving correctly, untill we came to the feet. I mentioned that I had come across problems weighting the little toe on the inside of the foot, and when paul took a closer look to see what the problem was, he found that it wasnt deforming properly because of two things. One was that there wasnt enough geomatry in the foot, I had forgotten to add an extra edge loop were a joint would be, and two, That the ankle joint was set just above were the ankle was supposed to be, almost halfway between the shin and the knee.

I had spotted this problem before, having mentioed it to several people saying the rig is out side the mesh, but when the joints were sized smaller I unfortunatly forgot about this 'minor' detail untill it was pointed out today. Also the control joints for the foot was slightly out of place aswell.

All this made it nearly impossible for me to use the rig, as it would make walking really awkward when it came to animation. paul said my options were to either call it a day with the model, and move to pre rigged monkey, or I would have to go in and do a bit more remodelling to the feet, make the bottom of the leg fatter to accomadate the ankle joint better, and make sure the joint controls were better lined up. the problem with this is that I would have to re rig the whole model again, aswell as change the model slightly,and go back and exclude all the vertices and paint weight again.

I chose to do the re rigging, as im so close to being able to animate with my own rig. I already have over 80 versions of the whole process saved so it was easy to find the save were I had everything how I wanted before I rigged, I added the edge loops and fattend the ankle, checked and double checked the rig was ok, rigged it, went in and excluded the verts and made sure the joints were functioning correctly. and then to tripple check, paul tested my rig by doing a practise walk cycle to make sure I had a fully functioning foot and was able to get all the poses I needed.

turns out the rig works great. only the toes wont be able to work individually, but as im not picking anything up with the monkeys feet thats ok.

so all I need to do now, Is go back and paint weight. Then I can move onto the facial rig. here are sum pics of what is hopefully my last attempt to rig the body.It takes me half a day to rig my character now.

Images of my altard model

rigging issues

after i had made the initial rig, there were several things wrong with it that i had to go back an sort out. once the first rig had been done, the next step was to exclude all the verts that were being influenced by widgets that shouldn't have been moving it, such as near the arm of my character, when you moved it up and down, there were parts of the chest and neck that was being moved aswell. so to fix that you have to exclude the verts using set up machine, so thats what i had been doing, i excluded all the body parts that were influencing things it shouldnt be, apart from the fingers and toes. i left the model at that point on friday, so it took me from tuesday to thurseday to rig it, then till friday to exclude the verts.  but on monday i discoverd that there wasnt enough mesh in the fingers to help define the exclusions, as when i did it, the fingers were still picking up influence anyway and being moved.  the same was also true for the feet, and i also had to add more of a space between the toes to help them deform. this is what i found out on monday. so today i went back to before i rigged the model, and i put in all the extra edge loops around the joints. i needed to put 3 loops around each one to make sure that when it bends it deforms nicely. which was easy to do as i have saved over 70 versions of both the model and the rigging process!!  so the rigging is once again done....for what must be over the 20th time, ive excluded the verts for both arms and the head.  all thats left for me to do is do the same for the legs and stomach, which wont take very long at all. also paul told me that you dont exclude the fingers or toes, or very rarely as there often quite tricky to do, so thats almost always left up to the paint weighting, which is the next stage after the exclusions. so by the end of today, i will have excluded everything,and i can then move on to paint weighting!!...hopefully, then i can move onto the face rig.

rigging continued

Before I did the final rig I also had to go back and add in more edge loops that help define the geomatry for the knees, knuckles,elbows and toes.This will help the mesh deform more smoothly when the character bends his limbs.

More rigging

Once Paul had shown me that you can change the size of the rig, I started to focus on the tail, it was the hardest thing to rig as its really curly, so all the time I spent modelling it was pointless, I had to go back to the saved version of my monkey before I rigged it and change the tail to a straight one. This made it so much easier to rig.

Rigging images

This was one of several attemps at rigging, This is how it looks when you have rigged it with set up machine, The problem I kept having was that the rigged joints would often stick through the model, but as it turns out there is a button or a slider that allows you to change the size of the rig without it effecting the joints,so if I would have known that I would have been able to progress faster with rigging.

First rigging attempts

I fixed the seam running around my monkey over the weekend, so now im starting to rig. This is the part ive been really dreading, as I think the technical side of maya is my biggest weakness, but I wanted to take a character from concept all the way through to animation, so I wanted to try rigging aswell.

I gave myself a dead line for it though, i didnt want to sit there and struggle with it and have rigging eat in to my animation time, so Dave found me a pre rigged monkey he saw on highend 3d.com, so if my rigging attempt didnt work, I at least had a back up, Isaid if it wasnt rigged by this wensday i would not carry it through, but after talking to Paul he said to give it a week longer as ive worked really hard on the modelling.

Thats what ive spent the last week doing, getting to grips with set up machine.I started on tuesday, rigged it about 25 times, changed the tail on the model so that its straight. As set up machine puts the widgets in straight and its just easier to go back and remodel. The next few images are of my rigging progress throughout this week.

finished 3d model

This is what my model looks like duplicated, there is still a slight seem that runs around the center of my model, but that will be gone once ive finnished the process of cleaning up the mesh, this mostly involves finding any stray verts that may be causing the creases in the topology, or extra edges that dont need to be there.

more modelling shots of the mouth sack

I got a lot of modelling done this week, I carried on adding more detail onto the face, defining the ears and nose more, also I watched a gnomon tutorial on how to make the interior of the mouth for 3d characters, this took me about two days to make, I had made some mistakes though and Matt helped me out by pointing out what had gone wrong and showing me how to correct it, I can now duplicate the half model, and carry on cleaning up the mesh, all being well I will be able to start rigging on moday.

Group work,Tims monkey model pics

Here is Tims clay model, I used this while I was making my 3d version, it helped me to model it having another 3d version i could look at. As i find it difficult to visualise my 2d dawings into 3d at the moment, so this was a big help in bridging that gap.

Group work, Jay to model,rig and texture turtle character

This is what I gave jay, who will be modelling my jimmy turtle character, This character is going to be used instead of the blow torch and the drill gag.Jay already modelled those props for me and as I changed the story and cut those gags out, I asked Jay if he would be willing to take on this new chracter instead. He will also be doing the rigging and the texturing of this chracter, as I do not have time, As this character is only in the story very briefly i told jay that the style does not need to be ultra realistic, as this would go against my other charcater and the set. Jay said all he would need from me is a rough turn around to work from, and he assured me this was accetable for him to get started with the model.

modelling shots of progression of work

This past week has been spent modelling my monkey in maya, so here are some screen shots of the progress of the modelling. I have been watching tutorial dvds given to me from Simon in helping me to understand the process more,as this is the first time I have attempted to model anything organic. At this time I am happy with the progress I am making on it.

animatic 4

This version is pretty much how its going to be timed, several scenes have been cut so I can just focus on the cycles more. This may get cut even more once I am in the blockout stage.

animatic 3

This is my 3rd version of the animatic, this is the one that I submitted to the crit.

2nd animatic

This is the 2nd animatic I did, there were still parts of it that I didnt like, it was still to long for one, so I retimed it and made another one.

animatics