These are the character updates so far from the Narrative Project. All the characters are finally ready for animation, which has also began. I spent a day re-creating the Jock's upper body (Although this lost me a day near the end of the project, I thought it was necessary as the Jock's arms previously were botched) Re-modelling, Rigging and Skinning in a day was a bit of a misery, but Im feeling much better about the character now. Here he is now, and below him, as he was before.




We have two large piece of character animation - The Cheerleaders walking in sync down a corridor and a Jock playing basketball. I've been working on the cheerleader walk cycle this evening, I think it is almost complete, just a couple of things to fix, but it is mainly out of the way. Here it is, complete with a bit of breast jiggle (My highlight of the project so far was adding this..)



Lastly, I had rigged and skinned the Nerd Girl. She is below. she'll only be used in a few scenes, so shes only rigged from the waist up (He legs were never going to move) I still need to texture the face (unfortunately for her this means Freckles/ Pimples )




Tommorow I'll be having a crack at animating the Jock playing basketball as well as the tentacle underneath the cheerleader's skirt.

I'm getting to closer to the final versions of the characters for the animation. There are a few issues still, but they are almost there. The jock's arms are still troublesome, due to the way I modeled it, but I've learnt that lesson with my first character and it won't crop up again. Below are a couple of shots. They have basic facial animations, which will be used.

I've decided to spend a couple of days re-rigging and tidying up my character models to make them easier to animate for all of us. Everything has been going fine, until the final stage, where the controls need to be grouped so they can be assign to the master control. I've followed the tutorial a couple of times and I'm still getting this same issue.. When I select a CTRL circle , be it a foot, pelvis or spine, it selects the entire group. The grouping layout is below, and I think it is correct. If I select the foot control individually from the outliner, it works fine, but clicking the nurbs circle in the viewport will select the entire 'DO NOT TOUCH' group.

I think my grouping must be off, but I cant see where. I'm going to keep looking over it, but if anyone has had this problem before and knows how to fix it, that would be smashing.

If Alan or anyone else who could help comes across this post, I'm having a bit of trouble deciding how to render a good looking sky backdrop. The images of the scene are below. The problem at the moment is the resolution of the texture, which would have to be huge to not look low-quality in the animation, meaning quite a long render time. The scene begins with the camera panning down from the moon, so the sky is in the focus quite a lot.

The other option I considered was removing the backdrop in Maya and adding it on After Effects, which would take less time to render, but surely I'd have to export my Maya camera into AE to get the motion on the backdrop. I've experimented with the Paint Effects nightsky, but I think that would be overkill for the simple shot.

Im taking a break from the Jock to move onto the cheerleader. With some knowledge of the problems I encountered doing the Jock, the modelling of the cheerleader has been altered a little, mainly with the clothing and arms. So far I have the basic shape / proportions. The concept exaggerated the thinness of the waist a lot more, but after looking at the Jock, I don't think that will animate too well (or rather, at this stage I don't think I can rig/ skin it well enough) so I'm going to try and make up for the lack of style on the waist with the chest and head.

The skirt is just a basic mesh at the moment, I'm going to add more detail, a trim and some offset to make it look more cloth-like. I was going to look into using N-cloth, which will prove to be another thing to read up on. The head is going to need quite a bit of work to get it looking nice.

I was thinking about reference some Pin-up girls for their natural traditional beauty. I caught an image of Audrey Hepburn baking a cake the other day and haven't been quite the same since, the image below show a sort of style I think would go well.




Below is the progress of my, not so appealing Cheerleader, but give it time, she doesn't even have a head yet.

They say there is more than one way to skin a cat, unfortunately, there seems to be only one way to skin a teenage Jock, and it's not easy. I've been skinning for the last day or so and I think I'm almost there. Unfortunately, there are some problems with the model. The Legs, spine, neck, hips etc all seem to work fine, however the arms are far from perfect. I modelled the jock with his hands facing forwards, instead of downwards, I didn't even think about how the shoulders would bend, so there is an error with that.

The jock's arm doesn't really move much throughout the animation, just in one scene (where he throws a basketball)  If I have time after the next character rig/skin then I'll go back and fix it, but for now, hopefully it will be OK.




The texture needs to be improved on this character, as well as the hair.It can then be split into three variations, using different hair pieces and face blendshapes. I need to do the facial animation blendshapes next and set up the eye look. This model is far from perfect, but I've learned a lot from it, and the next one should not have the same problems.

I've been getting back into work-mode and over the last day or so I've been rigging our Jock model, which will be split into three variations for our three jock characters. The rig is quite simple and I'm hoping there won't be too many problems when it comes to binding it to the model. Everything seems to be working so far!