Here's a face texture, I made it, I like it. Ignore the clothes.


I've also finished doing some test rigs, gotta' compare what's easier to animate though- a rig made traditionally or a rig made with the setup machine. Traditional seems more customizable and blabla, but setup machine is EASY... and quick.
I posed Knightmouse and did a render to show, shading artifacts aren't great.

Mudbox is awesome

OK, so it's been a while since my last post but only because I've had to work on other stuff. Apparently we have so much spare time we should really be doing a million other stupid little meaningless assignments and not working on our major final year project. Really, i mean it's not like it's important or anything. I'm sure we can pull out a fantastic little short film in the 2 weeks off in between doing other pointless shit. It's not like it takes long to do an animated film. I understand now why previous years' final animation projects have been so disappointing.
I mean I haven't really done any animation in almost a year but that's ok it's only an ANIMATION DEGREE!
But hey, I'm not bitter....really...

Now that I got that off my chest, onto the important stuff.

I've been working on modelling some characters for our film and in doing so familiarising myself with Mudbox. First impressions are it's pretty awesome.
I modelled a basic low-res human character in Maya and took it into Mudbox to add detail and got a little carried away. I then took that model and modified it to make a bunch of other characters using the sculpt layers feature. All these characters are using the same mesh and texture, normal and displacement maps.

These aren't final versions but just quick muck-around tests and renders.
Oh and the skin texture is pretty quick and nasty (ie.- crappy) but that was just me playing around with the texture painting ability in Mudbox.
I think I'll have to tone down the detail on the normal and displacement maps cos it's a bit too much.





Bum chins are awesome...





And this one's a combination or blend of 2 of the above models using the sculpt layers blending ability in Mudbox.


And finally here's an example of what happens when things go wrong with displacement maps and normal maps with Mental Ray.

Here is Mr.King. modelled, not textured.

Still gotta texture the feathers properly, redo the feat and add more feathers onto the wing.
I wouldn't mind doing a little bit of remodelling and making it more angular.

King and Eagle

Here's some pictures of the eagle, if he was in a world that only had one light and he were made of metal (ie. bad renders).





I'm probably about half way through modelling the king, I'm fairly happy with how he looks so far.
Here's what he'd look like if he was an amputee stuck in the desert.

Height Charts again

K, redone height chart, with a 3D version as well. The maya scene for the 3D version is ... with me. And on anim 18 scratch, under the knightmouse folder.
Enjoy.

Height chart (rough)

Here's the height chart. On the far left is the girl mouse, then KM himself, the Eagle, and an average human height. The king, of course, would be somewhere in between the eagle and the human. He's pretty short.