2010/2011 in review…

Masters is finally over, a few works/assignments/projects are made. As a person in the 3D animation work, a showreel is compulsory! Below is a pick of four of my finest work that shows improvement compared to my work during my degree.

Final Project is DONE!

Watch it now!

So was it good? Overall, I guess it is better than what I’ve done on my own so far… Does it has room for improvement? Always does. Will I make another improved version of it? Guess I will if there’s a mood for it.

After a Month…

Of texturing and lighting (and a little bit of editing here and there), the animation is on rendering stage! At this very moment, it is currently rendering shot 3 and there’s still 10 more shots to go but to add something onto this post, here’s a teaser if you may of the animation taken from shot 1 and 2 of the whole animation!

2nd Preview

Last Monday, I’ve had my 2nd preview presentation to show what I have done so far base on a previz which was made before. The strange thing is the preview must be shown in a form where it is the same (or close to) as the final product! Schedule-wise, that’s not possible at 2nd preview so I had to move my schedules around and have the pilot and mech rigged and animated sooner. Below is the resulting previz:

With a lot of things done, I’ve did some modelling of the environment but they are still in the early stages so I won’t be showing it yet. I do however have been texturing the mech using MudBox, Photoshop as well as Illustrator. Here’s the final product of it:

I might change the look a little bit but it is so far quite satisfactory. Hopefully I can make everything to look like they belong together later.

Rigging Done…

But it hasn’t been fully tested yet thus there will definitely be issues encountered during animation. So for the next few days when I’m doing the draft animation, I will be testing the rig and find and fix whatever it is that needs fixing! Anyhow, here’s the current mech rig and a close up of the hand:

It’s all rigid bind since they’re all hard surface models. For the controls, I use nurbs curves and then add some extra attributes especially to control the fingers  using Connection Editor and add functionality for opening and closing the hatch via Set Driven Key.

Day… Erm…

Let’s just say it’s been one month! I was away for quite a while and the “working” mode is taking a while to start. Anyhow, it has restarted and I’ve recently finished rigging the pilot and is moving on to the mech. Once that’s done, I ca start doing a draft animation to be shown for the preview presentation next week. Here’s a quick picture of the pilot posed like he’s walking I guess…

Just to detail it up, the pilot is rigged using Autodesk’s middleware, HumanIK. It’s basically a full IK rig where pulling say his hand all the way to the floor will make the rest of the affected body parts to follow thru so that it will look natural (maybe). Though animating it might be a bit harder when aiming for details, but I think it should be sufficient for this project.

Day 24; Disaster Strikes!!!

In the midst of rigging, it turns out that the file got corrupted. The big problem here is I don’t know what is causing the corruption… After like an hour of trial and error (a lot of errors), it turns out that the pilot’s body is corrupted that I couldn’t select the edges in the UV Texture Editor and that bug causes more bug else where. So I will have to redo my weight painting and rigging.

Speaking of rigging, the HumanIK caused some problem as well. Almost worried that I have to resort to using TSM but turns out I just need to use the OTHER HumanIK tool… weird but at least that problem is solved. I’ve also made some blendshapes for the face. I only came up with three as the dialog isn’t much and I would like to cheat a little bit later by hiding the face behind the visor except when he wants to talk. Anyway, below is the blendshapes:

As you can see the faces got some color on it. I’m also doing some base texturing since it’s a fast process. I’m still in the process of UV-ing the mech but hopefully I can get it done as well as rigging by early next week so that I can do a rough animation for the previz.

Day 22; Next Stage

With modelling of the pilot and mech done, I’m taking my time on the environment/hangar modelling and finish off the UV for the pilot and start UV-ing the mech. In previous post, I mentioned of using automatic mapping for hard surface. Turns out that’s a very bad idea unless the object I’m painting will only have one single color!!!

So I’ve decided to properly UV the mech using proper UV-ing methods. I’ve completed UV-ing the head and did a test painting on it. Works quite well except the color scheme that I picked is really not looking good. I might go for urban or desert camo later. Here’s a sample screen capture of the mech’s head:

I had to use flat lighting for the screen capture because MudBox can’t display N-gons (it will display as pitch black) and the smooth shading view has horrible shadowing! I might use Maya to do future screen capture. It may take longer but it will be more useful.

Other than painting, there’s a more important task of rigging in which I will do in the coming week. If possible, I would like to get both the pilot and the mech’s rigging to be done in a week. IF. :p

Day 21; Skipped a Day

Because my friends from Surrey & Exeter came for a visit. Had a great time as I get to see how to prepare a simple steak… not that I’ll make one anytime soon~ :p

Anyway, tomorrow is suppose to be my deadline for modelling but unfortunately modelling the hangar is no easy task. It’s not due to the detail it contain but it’s due to the scale of the model compared to the pilot or the even bigger mech. But I think I can fit in some of them into the other scheduled slot since I’m planning to move forward some of the rigging and animating for the preview.

So far I’ve modelled the walkway. The end part of the walkway is almost done so I might be able to put that into the preview once I’ve UV-ed it. Here’s a screen capture of it:

It may not be visible but the wall part of the walkway on both picture are actually different. That is because I forgot to save it! Fortunately the idea is there so rebuilding it only took me a few minute.

Tomorrow I’ll be finishing the UV on the pilot and hopefully be halfway done with rigging… The blendshape for the faces might take awhile though. It’s been like a year since I last do a proper blendshape. :/

Day 19; Mech is Complete!

Not including accessories which can be added anytime, the mech is finally complete and ready for UV/texture and rigging! The last update on the mech is the cockpit and here are the finished modelling state of it:

I’ve added two joysticks for the pilot to interact during the launch. The two joysticks will actually pops out of the seat after he activates the mech, so they will not be seen during the shot when the pilot enters the mech. Speaking of entering, here’s the completed hatch:

As you may notice, the upper hatch is modified to open differently. Instead of rotating from a pivot, it will flip using a mechanism not visible from the screen. The mechanism is located in the center thus the only time you could view it is from the sides.

With the mech complete, the last modelling will be the environment/hangar and the accessories for the mech. I might be behind schedule on the modelling of the environment as I need to put forward UV-ing and rigging so that I could animate a bit earlier and get a preview using the latest model within 2 weeks.