ik on monkey model

Their was a small worry today as I went to do another practise quad walk, I wanted to change it to IK but when I did the arms deformed quite badly, after playing around with it for a bit I found that the problem was that the elbow tabs on the rig needed to be moved out the way of the model, as when it touched it kinda broke the arm and twisted it. I thought it was originally a fault with the rig,and perhaps i had put the elbow widget in at a strange angle. But it appears to be in full working order.

monkey colours

I attempted to put the colours from my turn arounds onto monkey. They look ok just not like fur, also I did the textures on the proxy version thinking it would transfere onto the smoothed mesh, this hasnt happend so for now im going to give texturing a rest and see if it can be transferes across when I speak to the tutors, either way this is probably what my monkey will end up look like when he is textured.

Group work, Daves environment complete

Dave has just emailed me my set, its not got textures on yet because the files were to big to send over, I sent dave some concept art of what I wanted my set to look like, and hes done it perfectly, im really happy with the way its turned out, he asked me if it was ok to incorprate some mayan ruins into the scene,and as that is a theme of mine which I made him aware of, I gave him a free run with it , I thought it would be good to give Dave some artistic freedom with it, and it has paid off because its just like how I wanted it, great work and im very happy with it, he got it to me in good time, here are some screen shots.

2nd attempt at uv mappiing

Spent the weekend having a go at uv mapping, the uvs havent been unwrapped yet as I came across a problem doing it, but ive put mapping on all areas of the body now so even if I texture without unwraping it should look a lot smoother.

Heres my 2nd atempt, I had problems selecting certain faces, and I found that some of them are facing inwards, I dont know how it has happend but I have, but i worked round it.

first attempt at uv mapping

During this week my laptop crashed, taking with it half of my dissertation, and all my test animations as the files were corrupted, so unfortunatly I have no quad walk to show as of yet, My dissertation has been my main focus this week, But ive just finnished it, ready to print, so ive been watching tutorials on uv mapping so I can texture monkey.ill be doing this is sections and just referencing it in when its done, here are a few images of my first attempt.

expressions

Ive not updated in a while as I have been focusing on my dissatation, but ive been playing around with my monkeys expressions , and also been viewing tutorials on how to create texture maps, and checking out clips of monkey walks,jumps and runs. so the next stage is getting all my props and environments together, and start animating, most of the things I have given people to model, they are also texturing aswell, so I only have to worry about the monkey, but im going to start animating, and then do the texture in bits and pieces and then reference it in at a later date.

Matts help with eye deformation

my eye lids were not deforming as they should do when I went to paint weight them, I tried all day to fix it, Dave tried, and almost got there, but not matter what we did there was always a part of the eyelid in the corner that wasnt sliding down, even though all the influence was on in the corners. there was a time when we thought I may have to go back once again and model the eye closed, as this is what face rig machine recomends. but as luck would have it, Matt came up with this ingenious way to solve the problem. It involved creating a blend shape using four copys of my monkey. Im not to sure on the technical side of it all, so to see the technical process you can see it on matts blogger. My rig is now finally finished.

Its been one of the hardest things ive had to tackle in 3rd year, but im glad I stuck with it and saw it through to the end, I learnt a lot and can appriciate more how important it is to have a clean, well modeled character to work with, as the majority of the problems I incounterd was because of flaws in my model, Aswell down to my own inexperiance in using the set up machine program.

facial rig

Today I had my first go on facial rig, It took longer to set up then the body rig, but after a few attempts I seem to have done it ok, the only problem so far is the eyelids dont close properly. But I am going to paint weight them and see if that makes a difference, which it should as several people who are more into the technical side of maya then me have said it should be fine, their was a moment when I thought I might have had to go back and add more geomatry into the eyes to make them deform properly, but after Matt checked the mesh he said there was enough to work with and painting the weights should do the trick. The facial rig takes longer to set up, but this means there is less room for error as set up takes you through several stages inabiling you to place certain facial widgets in as you go along, making the whole process a lot smoother the the body rig.

The face rig took me several attempts, were as the body rig I have nearly eighty saves of the attempts.