Graded Unit Character Rigging

I've been working quite a lot over the past few days trying to get my character completely modelled, rigged, skinned and final textured.  So far I've done the modelling and rigging and I've almost completed the skinning - I used CAT to create a quick and dirty rig, but now that I have some experience in using it I was able to avoid the problems that I had with it when I used it on my last project, for instance I like to create three bones for the legs rather than two; a thigh bone, a calf bone and a bone which sits near the knee cap which helps keep the volume of the leg when deforming.  However when you create three legs bones in CAT and rotate the Pelvis backward and knee buckles, this doesn't happen when you use two bones for the legs, so I've decided to use two and the Skin Morph modifier for any clean up work.  Also CAT deals with IK chains in a very, very strange way; rather than putting the IK goal at the pivot of the last bone (like Max's Bones would), it places it at the pivot point of the next bone in the hierarchy (or where the next bone would be) as such you get something that looks like a foot roll.  Because of this my character's arms were animated using FK which is a much slower process I found compared to IK.  Below is an image of my work so far.

Left to Right: CAT rig, base mesh, base mesh with accessories

Graded Unity Character Modelling Base Mesh Complete

I Finally got a design for a head that I thought looked ok and after that I did the rest of the body in a short period of time.  The character comes in at 3,916 polygons which I'm quite happy with, especially since I've added two extra edge loops round the joints to help with deformations when animating, however because I won't be subdividing it further there are areas such as on the hands which I could optmize later on.  I'm really looking forward to getting this character fleshed out a bit more and textured, I'm going to try to use Max Skin Wrap modifier to drive my characters clothes using the underlying base mesh, it could have disasterous consequences and I might end up having to weight it to the skeleton, but I'm always trying to do something new for each project and this is one of the things I'd like to try.

Graded Unity Character Modelling

I began modelling my character a few days ago, I'm trying to do it all inside of Max rather than fleshing something out, taking it to Mudbux for sculpting then back into Max for retopology becuase I thought it would be quicker, however I have no experience of box modelling faces, so it's turning out to be quite a challenge.  Also, my design has slightly changed; I had initially planned on making my characters' foremarms and calves very rounded (like Popeye) to be more cartoony, however I couldn't get them looking the way that I wanted so his design is much more normal now.

Rendering Character Animation Brief

A lot of what I did during my Character Animation brief was building to this point - rendering.  I deliberately have a simple, low resolution scene with basic lighting and textures to reduce render time, the character is quite well detailed, however, with 2 x 2k for his body and clothes and some nice trickery to fake some effects such as subsurface scattering (SSS).  I'm using Max's relatively new and fast Output shader: 'HDR motion blur' which blurs your renders using a Velocity render pass (pretty much) but also has some nice feature to tweak the effect.  Currently the render time is at around 4:45 per frame in a scene with around 220,000 polygons. So given that I have 18 seconds of animation at 30 frames per second, it should take me around 42 hours and 45 minutes to render...  Looks like I'll be leaving my computer on overnight.  Below is the first frame of the animation:

Graded Unit Initial Theme Test

I'd like to try and create a slightly painterly, cartoony theme in my scene and so I did an initial test which was creating a low resolution polygonal crate, textured in Photoshop with normal bump and specular maps.  Hopefully this test will convey to others what my other objects will look like in my scene and give them an idea of how the character will be textured too.  I created the texture maps at 1024px x 1024px so that I could get some nice detail and reduce the size to 512px x 512px later if required to save memory or render faster.

 Render

 Wireframe

 Diffuse

 Normal

 AO

 Cavity

 Bump

Specularity

Graded Unit Continued

Over the past few days I've did some concept sketches and have now done a model sheet.  I was considering what modelling techniques to use - box or polygonal - for the main character, I haven't tried box modelling before so I've decided that I'll use that method.  I also went out with my camera and too reference images of urban area and items to be used and modelling in 3D for my character's environment.  Lastly I did research on the 3D games industry; trends, technical constraints and growth in certain areas and after doing this I've decided to aim to work within the technical limitations of a handheld device such as a Nintendo DS, PSP or even an iPhone.

Graded Unit Started

The graded unit is the only unit of the course where you're assigned a mark for your work, i.e. A, B, C or D, all the other pieces are pass or fail.  We had four choices of topics to undertake for the graded unit which included a 3D fly through, character rigging for a strategy game, emergency shelter design and creating a commercial with anthropomorphic characters.  After some thinking I decided to go for the character rigging option because I eventually want to become a character TD but there were other reasons also, for instance; for the 3D fly through you had to render out a 30 second animation and I think I might have found it hard to get the correct balance between high quality modelling, light and texture versus an exceptable render time.  As for the emergency shelter design, I have adsolutely about the current designs for such shelter or the materials and other components which make them and also I felt more passionate for the other options and sometimes when you have to work late into the night it's passion which makes you do it.  The last option, the anthropomorphic character advert, I gave some consideration to because it involved an array of characters and I would've enjoyed the challenge of rigging, skinning and animating them on time, however the advert was for breakfast cereal and I had to chose atleast four of the following characters: teapot, mug, milk jug, toast, butter, pot of jam, egg in an eggcup or fruit and I really had no idea of how I was going to effectively and efficiently texture them; many of the items in the list would require good knolwedge of reflections, refractions and subsurface scattering, so I decided against it.