this week has been a bit unpredictable, but i did get a lot done throughout. a summary of what this week has consisted of would be that i had to fix my teammates character, rig her face and a disappointing trip to campus.
lets get into it, for starters, i knew i was going to do my teammate character's face rig a week ago, so that wasn't what i thought was unusual, but the character's overall structure was what shocked me. upon opening the file i noticed a chaotic jumble that was the character's wire-frame, which is a huge mistake for any 3D animator. a wire-frame, or as animators refer to it, topology, is the grid on the character's mesh, it consists of vertexes, which are little dots that are used to modify the mesh. i think this article would help explain it better D. (2016, May 27). Why Do We Need Topology in 3D Modeling. Thilakanathan Studios. http://thilakanathanstudios.com/2016/09/why-do-we-need-topology-in-3d-modeling/#:%7E:text=Topology%20is%20the%20organization%2C%20flow,is%20efficient%2C%20clean%20and%20detailed.&text=It%20is%20important%20that%20you,when%20building%20your%203D%20models. the author describes topology as "the organization, flow and structure of vertices/edges/faces of a 3D model" and he also goes on to explain it's importance in the workflow of an animator.
in my teammate's case, she had a bunch of unnecessary loops going around her body, which in result caused a pinching in the skin of the character. i had to sit and fix the model accordingly by eliminating the unnecessary loops and reconnecting some parts back together. this took several hours, and i had her on call so i can show her what i'm fixing, firstly so she can confirm that it looks as she wants it to look, and partially to teach her the right thing to do. now i am in no position to teach her, but this is advice i got from my previous professor, and it proved to help me out a lot, so i did solely to make sure she never does this again.
after the model was cleaned up, i tested the character's rig, which to my surprise, also needed a lot of adjusting. she had a lot of extra bones that only made the rigging and skinning process harder, so i advised her to re-rig, as this character is our main one and she needs to be in tip top shape.
while she did so, i got on to rigging the baby bud, which was done in a little over 2 hours thankfully, here is a rig test:
he lacked a neck, so i went straight to a head bone from the spine, can't wait to pose him! after the rig, i worked on texturing the little guy, and here is how he is looking
all that is left for this little guy is to texture his cradle, and he should be set for animation. i also made a mouth closing animation for him so we can have a little movement.
i did end up making the face rig for my teammates character while she worked on key-framing some shots, it went a bit slow as her model kept glitching out on me, but a simple restart fixed the file, and i was able to complete it on time. one other problem was the face topology on my teammate's character, it was a bit poor so i had to work around it.
that it about it for this week, i wish i had seen the model sooner, but it is too late now, we have to move on to animation, i just hope it goes better than the rigging stage.
REFERENCE LIST:
http://thilakanathanstudios.com/2016/09/why-do-we-need-topology-in-3d-modeling/#:~:text=Topology%20is%20the%20organization%2C%20flow,is%20efficient%2C%20clean%20and%20detailed.&text=It%20is%20important%20that%20you,when%20building%20your%203D%20models.