Term 2

Having started the new term Jonno has assigned me with the task of modelling the kitchen; he gave me two weeks to have it finished completely; i have managed to do it with two days to spare and am very happy with how it has turned out. I feel that the modelling in it is very strong as the geometry is very clean as i have tried to keep it to quads as opposed to triangles; this helps for texturing. Here are a few screenies of the finished piece:

I am very pleased with the tortoise and ultimately my first rigged character; however it did cause me plenty of headaches when trying to weight it. I found that because of its short stuby legs it deformed quicker than any other creature, which obviously has longer thinner legs, this made it hard to weight and i can only imagine how much better it will be to weight something with much longer legs. Anyway heres a quick test animation just to see if the rig works ok, or at least enough for what we want it to do.

Here are the images of the tortoise once i figured out how to wrap deform a model; this allows me to rig and weight a low polly model and then sub divide it into a high polly model before simply wrap deforming the high polly mesh around the low polly allowing the high polly mesh to be effected by the weighting.

During the Christmas break i have been working heavily on modelling and rigging the small pet tortoise for the film. Although not a main character we felt it added comedic appeal and we plan to have it appear more than what was initially shown in the animatic. Here is a blocked out version of it, rigged and weighted. I am quite pleased with this as it was a good oppertunity to familiarise myself with rigging and weighting and a good building block towards rigging the main characters. It has taken me a while to do but i had to learn all the principles for weighting, which took me quite a while.

I am however quite unhappy with the lack of direction from the Director over this period and although i was given the work to do the tortoise i felt that there could have been alot more guidance; i was not given a clear model sheet as i had to source one myself, which i felt was poor. To add to that difficulty the tortoise approved by the director was then decided inappropriate as the neck came out the shell and not under it. This was decided after i had modelled and rigged the chosen design. This meant i had to remodel it and rig it to fit the new design. I also feel that the group could have done more work; i understand it was a busy period over christmas for everyone as i was working 30 hours a week plus any family visits.etc but yet i still managed to model and rig a character; i feel that other group members did not put in the same commitment over this period. When we finished the term Jonno wanted all characters modelled and half the environments started; we ended up with 1 character being modelled and rigged that being mine....