More blocking...

This week the blocking phase continues. This week I have to block the ending hallway sequence and the Viking party room. This shouldn’t be too difficult it is just time consuming. Bocking is boring, but it’s interesting to try and recreate the shots from the storyboards. This is the first time I have ever really used the board to decide what my shot is going to look like. I am not sure that all of the shots transfer well form 2d drawings to 3d compositions. This is something that we are going to have to talk about as a group and try to get the most interesting compositions that we can. Some of the shots seem flat to me, but there is always time to change them before we start animating. One more week of blocking, and then we get to animate. I can’t wait to get to the animation phase.

Layout

This week we finished up all of the texturing for our characters. With their simple lambert textures they are starting to look a lot more like the character designs. It’s nice to see everything starting to come together. The next task is to set up all of the shots. It’s a boring job but it has to be done. From the shots that I have already completed, I see that the sets are not completely matching up with the animatic, so something are going to have to be changed a slight bit to make them work in the 3d sets. The scenes that I am setting up don’t have any crazy camera movement so it should be easy to get the compositions we are going for. Doing layout isn’t as exciting as modeling or animating but it needs to be done.

Buddha....

This week we had to have all of the textures created. Aside from this task, I had to rework Buddha to make him fit in with the rest of the character design. I got a little carried away with Mudbox and added way too many details for the look we were going for. I liked the way that the Buddha model was coming out. When I get some free time I want to finish it so I can use it on my demo reel. I initially was going to start the model over from scratch, but I found a way to save the base mesh. The problem was that it was subdivided too many times. I solved these issues by manually delete some of the edge loops. After I had finished with that tedious task I smoothed out most of the details that were left on the mesh. The next step was to model back in some of the details. I added a collar, his nose, and hair. I am about to start in on the textures, which shouldn’t be too bad considering that we are going with simple matte colors.

Skinning & Rigging

This has been a stressful week. This week our mile stone is to have everything textured , rigged and skinned. My job was to rig and skin, generic human and st. peter. I encountered many problems rigging Generic Human. The proxy skeleton was a nightmare from the very beginning. I modeled GH in the pose from the turnaround drawing. His arms were down at his side and his feet were in a weird position. This made the rigging very difficult and took much longer than it should have. The skinning of GH wasn’t that hard and went pretty smoothly. When it comes to St. Peter, he had his own problems. Because of his shape it wasn’t like rigging a regular biped. I ended up making it only the upper part of his rig. This seemed like a good idea at first and saved some work but led to interesting problems later on. When skinning St. Peter the fact that he had no lower rig made every joint have some sort of control over something that it shouldn’t. So instead of starting with rough weights and making them better I had to basically start form scratch, which was fun. I also encountered a problem when weighting his arms, since they are in two pieces weighting the sleeve to the hand was tricky and different. I had to try out a lot of different things to get them to look presentable. Over all this week was a boot camp in rigging and skinning something that I haven’t done in a few semesters.

This week led to a lot of moving sideways and backwards. I spent most of this week, re working Hugh’s design. My original thought was to make generic human, well, generic. I wanted to try and make Hugh a little more defined. This seemed like a good idea at first, but once I saw what the rest of the guys were doing I realized that I needed to change Hugh. We as a group decided that he still needed to me changed. I thought when I started to make changes it would have been simple, but one change leads to more changes and that takes more time. He needed to be more cartoon like and less realistic. I had to reshape his body, make new arms and hands and make his feet larger. I also had to get rid of the face I had made and simplify it. I am happy with the design now, and it should fit in much better with visual aesthetic we are going for. This has put me behind on the Buddha sculpt, I will have to make that time up some where else.