Art Studio Personal Project (Spring 2007)
The Concept:
I will take my character, RaptorBlood, and take him through the
pipeline, including concept sketches, concept research, modeling,
texturing, rigging, facial blend shaping, creating a character
interface, corrective blend shaping, and animation. I will also watch
the DVDs based on hyper-realistic creature creation, which covers
modeling, rigging, and facial animation.
Goals
I
want to learn to create a charcter to be able to put into my portfolio.
I want to be able to create an interface using MEL scripting in order
to showcase my technical abilities. I want to create a hyper-realistic
character following the hyper-real character creation series.
Deliverables
An animation demonstrating the abilities of the character.
Estimates on Scheduling
January 2007: modeling (Complete)
February: texturing and rigging (Complete)
March: rigging, skinning, and control creation (Complete)
April: clean-up, corrective blendshaping, and animation
Stage 1: Concept (12/30/06)
RaptorBlood is a half-reptile, half-man anthro muscle bound creature. His main features are a reptilian face with a mostly human body. He has seven horns on the top of his head, and stripes across his face, torso, and legs. He is 7'6", weighs 320 lbs. Here are a concept drawing and a couple of character sheets.
Stage 2: Modeling (1/10/07)
Using a modeling technique that focuses on muscle groups, edge loop modeling, and quad topology, I created a mesh for my character in Maya. The mesh has approximately 15K polys.
Stage 3: Unwrapping and Texturing (1/28/07)
I unwrapped the mesh using the unwrap tool in Maya, and I applied a snake skin texture to the character, along with a normal map that simulates the bumpy snake skin feel. I applied Maya's Subsurface Scattering material to the character to give him a softer look.
Stage 4: Rigging, Character Set Up, and Skinning(2/20/07)
Next came the rigging and character set up portion. I used two sets of rigs: a control rig used to pose the character, and a bound mesh rig used to deform the model. I also set some driven keys for the control of FK/IK Switching, hand controls, and foot controls.
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 Bound Rig used to render the character. |
IK/FK switching system: it is able to switch between IK and FK smoothly using set driven keys.
Stage 5: Corrective Blend Shaping(3/10/07)
I decided that the skinning wasn't quite enough, so I added corrective blend shaping to the character in order to get good looking deformations. Corrective blend shaping is basically setting a driven key on a certain axis of rotation on your bone so that when that bone rotates, it triggers the blend shape. I feel that this method is better than influence objects, because you get to model your results instead of having a shape dictate what it will look like.
Stage 6: Corrective Blend Shaping(4/15/07)
At this point, I decided to test out the rig and did a couple of rendered poses.
