The third instalment of this painstaking research project is almost here. After spending much deliberation on improving my previous ones, I decided to scrap that idea and start from scratch with a new rig, senior Moom rig. I love it, so much better than Andy rig.
With time management in mind, I decided to cut down on the amount I was animating, so this 3 second piece should be more in-depth in regards to animation.
Dialogue Clip: Step Brothers
I’m now at to the animation stage for my project, and blocking is underway. Here’s a really rough preview of progress today…
After much deliberation, I have decided to re-do my entire client project with a new story, situation and character. This has been decided after having a hard time rigging my previous character(s) and discovering that I really don’t have time to animate 2 different characters at this stage in the project! I have started to use CAT, an alternative rigging plug-in for 3D Studio Max. Over the past few days I have designed a new character, modelled and (successfully) rigged with CAT.
Below are a couple of images showing this new character from concept to completion. I still have texturing to do on him and animating will start very soon, new storyboards on the way…
Initial Character Design
Model with custom CAT Rig
For the past two days I have been focusing my efforts on my first character’s facial expressions. Following this tutorial I have managed to create a fully workable facial rig with added slider efficiency. Next step will be rigging the body. I have taken into account other programs to auto-rig, but I think a manually made rig will suit my needs a lot better.
So far I’m on schedule for my client project, and deep into the modelling stages. The last few days has been spent solely on the mouth of my first character. It has taken awhile to get something that I’m happy with. I’m going to go ahead and rig up the face with sliders, to get a better understanding of how I can show some extreme expressions.
I have now completed my first artefact. This has really helped me learn a bit more about the use of strong poses and how vital the graph editor can be when splining out the animation at the end. The next artefact I will be doing will be based on the emotion of sadness. Feedback welcome.
Artefact 1: Happiness from Kane Pickerill on Vimeo.
