Character Creation: Duck-Billed Platypus Part 4

By Stuart Brown

Rigging the Platypus was the next stage. I used the orthographic views to help construct the skeleton, the same process as the alien model. The difference with this character is that he is more complex, and also required a tail bone, belly bone, and more joint chains for toes and fingers.

Once I completed the skeleton I started adding controls, having to also consider how controls would work for the tail and belly. I model was much more difficult than the alien also because he is larger and broader, meaning he required extra thought to accommodate his build. 

I then colour coded the rig to make it easier to see, the left side being blue, the right red, and any in the middle yellow. I did this by going into the attribute editor, the drop down menu of drawing, and ticked enable overrides. I simply then changed the colours.

I ran into some trouble when freezing the transformations as the locators seemed to increase in size. Temporarily I froze them anyway, deleted the history and reduced them to 0.2 in scale rather than 1 to make the model easier to work with. 

The next stage I did was parent the controls. When doing this I realised that the skeleton of the tail was child of the root, and thought this would make more sense to be child of the Hip dislocate as it needs to move with this joint, so I changed this and reduced the joints in the tail, using it more like a third leg.

Next I used the constraints Orient, Aim and Point for the control points to control the skeleton.  For these I always pressed maintain offset and all axis, but for the elbows where I only selected Y. 

The next stage was to use IK Handles on the legs. There is two options, Rotate Plane Solver, and Single Chain Solver. RP allows the joint to move in a direction, so I used this for the leg and the SC for the toes, and also the tail. I then parented the IK handles to the foot and tail controls. I used the parent constraint on the knees by parenting the locator and leg IK handles. 

I then clicked on the root of the skeleton, right clicked and pressed 'select hierarchy', held shift and selected the geometry and pressed Skin>Bind Skin>Smooth Bind. The next stage of this model is to start painting the weights. The resolution to the locator scale issues was to click on the locator, and change its locator attributes found in the attribute editor to 0.2 from 1.

Character Creation: Duck-Billed Platypus Part 3

By Stuart Brown

The platypus model was unfortunately not quite finished before Meg went to Germany, this was because for a unknown reason, the model didn't seem to work on her laptop, forcing all work for it having to be done in college.

I started with giving the character a mouth, as in the story boards he requires it. I made two edge loops in the centre of the mouth, and deleted the faces between them, and the patched them up by adding faces horizontally to make the roof and bottom of a mouth. I then started looking at the UV map. I was left partially done and unwrapped, apart from the feet, beak, bottom of the tail and torso. The edges also need sew the UV together

I then unwrapped the necessary areas and stitched the UV's. I re projected the feet from a different angle as the current ones didn't work. Then, I placed all the UV's into the square creating this look. 

The next part of this, was texturing this UV. I exported a UV snap shot and placed it into Photoshop. I pressed command I to invert it, and placed it on the blend mode multiply. The first thing I did, was colour the basic colours on the texture.

I then used different brushes to create different textures. Some gave a furry effect I used, and some gave a dotted texture I used for the more duck like grey features to give a look resembling pours in the skin. I spent a quite a bit of time re looking and images of Platypus' to get the right texture but still making him look cartoon like.  The last was a rough texture for the cotton. I used different shades of the basic colours to give him more variation.

I then added a thick black line around certain areas to make him look more cartoon like and comic styled, also bearing in mind how the environment was textured so he will fit in nicely.

I placed this on the character, and noticed some problems, most noticeably on the head band, where the soft preview (which we want the characters to be in) is different to the other UV, which made his head band look like it was melting onto his head.

I then fixed this problem by exporting a new UV snapshot of the soft preview UV and working around that. This fixed the issue.

 The last stage was to add his markings. This was easier than I thought it would be. I simply drew them on a new layer with a white normal brush, double clicked the layer and gave it a black this stroke effect. I then put the craquelure texture on via filter gallery, altered with the settings so it looked how I wanted,  and placed it on. When doing this, I thought of my inspiration for the character which was much of Tonto from the lone ranger, and gave the markings a similar texture to how his face make up looks.

I placed this on, and was very happy with the result. I am proud of the texture I produced and think the character is looking fantastic. 

Adding to the environment

By Callum Brown

There are elements of the environment that the anamatic requests however there was not time for our modeller to do so I took over. It was easy work. In order to create the the empty barrel and crate, I simply duplicated them, and in the duplicate I deleted everything except the side face, before laying it on the floor, I then deleted the side face from the original models. I lastly added scratch marks to the texture and re assigned them to the models. I then duplicated alot of the trash and moved/rotated it so it lead to a barrel and crate, and put some inside. I then made a loaf of bread by creating a a cube, made it longer, and put on edge loops on the bottom and left and right of the loaf, I then added an edge along the top and pulled it down, now it already looked good in the smooth preview so I went to mesh - smooth. I then moved a chunk away and added lots of edges pulling them up and down to create mite marks. I then selected the sides and used planar mapping from the camera to project the map. I then used the same technique as I did on the raccoon to texture it.My next part was easy enough, I created the '!' and '?' marks buy creating them in photoshop and saving them as TIFF files, making sure I had the 'keep transparency' box ticked, so when I assigned them to a plane they had no background, I also used this technique for the fur on the floor, the footprints and thought bubbles of the t-rex, except I drew the t-rex's by hand, and only coloured them in photoshop.With the footprint I simply made a pair, then duplicated them so they formed the path.

 

UV Mapping the Raccoon

By Callum Brown

After sorting out the problem that kept me from UV mapping I tried again, Meg had already managed to do a large part of this, however I still needed to do the head, hat, legs and boots. I did all of this with relative ease, selecting the edges, converting then to UV's cutting them and unfolding the mesh was all fairly straight forward. The most time consuming element was trail and error, making sure the colours match to where they should be. After taking the UV snapshot and saving it as a JPEG, I opened it in Photoshop and I inverted the image and put the layer on multiply, painting behind it and making the layer invisible before saving it as a JPEG, before opening up into Maya and assigning a new material and applying a new lambert, then finding the file and pressing 6 to view it. I then went into skin, bind skin, smooth bind to make him permanently smooth, and bind him to the skeleton and controls. I am tremendously happy with the model so far, he really looks like a 3D version of my drawing. However I have hit another  brick wall in the weight painting. After the selecting the tool, as I hover over the character and while the mesh stays intact, the colours all become a 2D mess on the wall. I've asked my tutor to help me and he requested I send the file to him, as he has not seen the issue before, I've attached a picture of the problem at the bottom and intend to post about how I fixed the issue when my tutor finds out what it is.

Character Creation: Raccoon Part 5

By Callum Brown

As our modeller had alot of problems working from the turnarounds I provided, so I decided to fix the problems I had created. I started by making the boots bigger, wider an deeper, because although in the normal view it looked good, in the smooth preview it wasn't clear enough where the boot ended and where the leg began. I then gave the hat a little bit more shape, making it a more distinctive cowboy hat. Before modelling the coat, making it stick out more, providing more room for the bigger boots to move. I also made the  collar and lapel fold our more and have a deeper rim, as again, in smooth preview it was too smooth, which would have given me a harder job in UV mapping. I did the same thing to the cuffs of the coat. Next I hit my biggest problem, Meg had the issue to start with and couldn't find the solution, the UV's in the legs, bots, head and hat would not unwrap, they weren't doing it wrong, they were just acting unresponsive. I asked Annabeth, Mike, Luca, Ash all for help but nobody could seem to figure out the issue. I ended up e-mailing Mat and he came in to help me figure out what was going on. It turned out to be problems with the internal geometry and edges. Some of the faces were pointing the wrong way, there were alot of unnecessary faces also and some of the edges and vertex's were very close together but not merged. I started by deleting the useless faces, and using the split tool and amend polygon tool to create new faces and fix the geometry and merged the vertex's. I then removed the whole hat from the head, and I saw that there were too many faces on the top of the head to match up with the hat so I deleted and the faces and edges that were left over, shaped it to fit the hat and merged the edges and vertex's with the head and hat back together. After spending an large amount of time figuring out and fixing this issue before turning by sights on making sure the model looked great in smooth preview as it was we wanted to convert our models too. However doing this usually meant the the normal view was screwed up and would not UV correctly, I eventually managed to make the geometry work whilst making it look better in Smooth preview. I lastly gave him eyelids in order to blink, and convey better emotion.

Creating the Alien - Week 5

The next stage consisted of creating the walk, jump and idle cycles. Which was all fairly easy, I used the control points to set him in my desired position, and selected all the control points and clicked on the first keyframe before pressing s, to set the keyframe. I then copied this key and pasted it to the last key so the motion could play on a loop. I lastly exported all the cycles as fbx files, and called them the name of the cycle. I then opened up Unity, created a new project and imported the files individually by going to import assests, new asset, and finding the file. I then clicked on the assets individually and changed the mode to legacy, and the scale to 1. I then dragged the fbx files in the assets folder to the Alien so he could perform all the animations. I then opened Mono to paste in the script, changing purple writing to exactly the same names as my animations, this enables him to select an animation to play at random. I then created a new game object, and set the camera to follow it, by changing the target under the mouse orbit script I added, under this script I could also change the distance and speed of the camera. I lastly added a sunny skybox and directional light to make the turntable more appealing. I saved both a web player version and mac osx.

Creating the Alien - Week 4

I was then ready to bind my finished rig to the model, I did this by using bind, smooth bind. So his body had a less rigid surface and felt more realistic. We had to tick certain boxes in the smooth bind menu to give him his correct influence, for instance I only upped the smooth by 1. I then went on to do the weight-painting which I found difficult at first, but after finding the colour graded view and the feathered edged brush it became alot easier. I also found myself moving the model round using the control points, seeing how the weight-painting effected the movements, using a large amount of trail and error to create the right flow. I mostly used the green and yellows, with blue on the sides to create a gentle fade but this mostly considered on the joint. For the mouth, and jaw joint I had to select the certain faces I wanted to paint, change the view to 'view only selected' and then go into paint-weighting, to create a more controlled environment and refined workspace so I could create a contrasted paint weight. So only the bottom half of the mouth would move.  I was also very careful when applying the eyebrows, creating a thin, feathered line. I lastly went down the list of controls, making sure I had not painted another part of the model in the background, and tested him out until everything was working as it should.

Next I added the attributes, the peel heel, tap toe, stand tip, twist toe, and twist heel to the foot controller, I then added the fist attribute to the hand controller, and blink to the eye adding the maximum and minimal values, mostly 10, 0 and -10 where necessary. I then opened the outliner window,  so I could select the driver. then selected the attribute and selected edit attribute. Making sure the foot controller was the driver, and the attribute's right rotational value was the driven. We then key framed the motion and made sure the attribute was on the right value. I did this to all the attributes in the feet before moving to the others, in the hand I had to select various joints in the hand, and use their rotational value as the driven, and the fist controller as the driver. We then key framed the fist movement in the same way, taking the thumbs movement into consideration. When considering how the model would blink, we had to start by using parent constraints. The eyeballs to the skeleton's eye ball movement, and the eyelids to the head skeleton. I then used set driven keys to create the blinking of the eyes, using the the eye control as the driver, and the mesh's rotational x value as the driven.

The forearm roll was probably the most complicated part of this process as it involved alot of thought and maths. I went into the Hypershade menu, and selected the multiply/divide option. Then I selected the wrist joint, then shift selected the multiply/divide, and then the forearm joint. I then opened up the Hypergraph window, and middle clicked the first in the chain, and dragged it to the second. This opened up a new window the 'connection editor' where I could place the inputs to the rotational values. This is where it got complicated for me, in the outputs, I had to choose the 'Input x 1' option, and in the inputs, we had to select rotation x. Confusing. After the options are highlighted you can close the window and it saves them, When applying the multiply/divide to the forearm, we had to choose the rotate x in the output, and select the forearm rotate value for the input. This took me a long time to understand, and seems to be a complicate way of doing things, but it has to be done this way for the chain to make sense, and the mulitply/divide has to come between the two joints, so I can set the multiply to 0.5, so the forearm only rotates half of what the wrist does. We do this by double clicking the multiply/divide in the Hypershade menu and change the inputs in the attribute editor.

The last thing I did was put in limits for the controls, so the joints could not bend in a way they could not, or should not. E.g elbows bending backwards. I did this by clicking on the control, going to either the rotation or translate tool (whichever applies), and ticking the max and min box's and setting your number manually in the attribute editor. I did this to all the necessary controls. I then went to mesh - smooth to give him a nicer texture and added a attribute to control it. I also had to fix an unforeseen problem as he seemed to fold in on himself, This was fixed by grouping all the layer together, but the eyes still remain the same size, I solved this by selecting the eyes, right clicking the layer and pressing remove selected from layer, and putting them into the geometry layer by right clicking on the layer and pressing 'insert selected into layer'. I then grouped all the layers together again and named it do not touch.

Although this process has been difficult for me, I am glad I have the skills I need to create a fully working model. It is something I shall practise and make sure I keep on top of, as it was a hard skill to learn and I do not want to forget it.