i am combining the first 2 weeks of this trimester into 1 blog, as i only worked on 2 thing throughout.
over the course of the 3 week break we got, we managed to progress with the character and environment textures, i ended up fully texturing the character with just a couple adjustments needed as suggested by my facilitator. during the first week of this trimester, i worked on adjusting the textures based on my facilitator's needs and meeting his expectations.
with the textures finished just as week 2 dawned upon me, i got the final approval from my facilitator and began figuring out the rig for my character. it wasn't as challenging as i thought, as he only has one hand, which is (in my opinion) one of the hardest parts to rig, given it's repetitiveness and tedious naming stages. to explain it better, each finger has to have 3 bones, which in total gives me 15 bones to name accordingly, after that is set, each bone has to have an assigned controller which has to be aligned to it's pivot point. after aligning everything, each bone has to be assigned a rotation constraint in order for it to move properly, and those controllers have to be named individually as well.
well...with all that done, the rest of the rig was easy enough, it is pretty straight forward, with the rig done, i began skinning, which in short means to make the skin understand how to react to the bone movements. what i do first is i animate a quick rig test, moving every part of the character so i can easily scroll through and check how the skinning is working. the skinning was done fairly quick, because my character is composed of many separate parts (his hand for instance, is separated from his body) i had to put a lot of separate skinning modifiers to carry out the job.
here is the rig test with the skinning done as well, this helps to preview the rig without having to boot up 3DSmax.
alright, body down, face is left now, which was the most fun thing i do. i've done face rigs before for a character i worked on, so i know how it works. basically i just make copies of the body and make different faces for each. after i did the faces, i added the morpher modifier on the main body and the magic began! i made some quick unfinished renders of the faces and posted them to my instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CGL2IYDlvEA/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link and people love this guy more now, i wanted to give him a charming smile and i guess based on the feedback, mission accomplished!
i have to say, i am pretty happy with how this guy looks! considering i love showing emotion through faces rather than body animations, i could confirm that this was my target goal.
starting next week, we will start composing our shots, so hopefully that goes well!