...give up?
FROSTBITE!! Hahaha - get it? Huh? Frostb- ok, that joke sucked. *sigh* Anyway...
My first freelance project in 2009! But this isn't really it... everything down here is being scrapped and redone, that's why I'm able to post it. It's still a W.I.P., maybe will post the details and finished work when it's done.
Anyway, it's a Tiger [duh]. The client went to my wife first for her to make several designs of different animal mascots for their service/product and the tiger is one of the designs that made it. My part was to build the mascots in 3D and rig them up for animation and stills and stuff.
The challenge in this is that it had to really match the original 2D cartoon design - every pose that it makes needs to have a nice, smooth silhouette and all the deformations should still retain that 2D-ishness [
?] of the original design. My favorite reference for that kind of stuff was Kung Fu Panda with their ultra-squishy 3D characters that behaved very 2d-like [
no offense to WALL-E, but come on... Kung Fu Panda was wayyyy more fun!].
So these were the test renders to see whether the deformation rig would work or not [this is the model without the costumes on, since the main issue was body deformation]. At first I was going to do a full muscle-rig but then I realised that
[*small voice* I wasn't being paid enough to go through that kind of trouble :P] So in the end, it came down to the normal careful weight-painting and a lot of pose-space deformers for corrective blendshapes.
Hopefully when this whole thing is done, I can post up the images a few months from now :D
...it was only while testing them out, I realized there are quite a few mistakes that I gotta fix - some of the controls don't make sense, and I could've tied up the connections more efficiently :( ...anyway, that'll have to wait- my flight back to Sabah is tomorrow, will be gone all week, and since the new semester's coming up, there's still a lot of paperwork to do *grumble grumble*
Thought I'd treat myself to a New Year's present, so I got meself a new toy. This. Is. So. Cool. I can't stop playing with it! The video quality is sharp as hell, and it performs better than I thought it would under low-light conditions. Hopefully I'll be using it in a lot more VFX-related work in the future.
So these were the test renders to see whether the deformation rig would work or not [this is the model without the costumes on, since the main issue was body deformation]. At first I was going to do a full muscle-rig but then I realised that [*small voice* I wasn't being paid enough to go through that kind of trouble :P] So in the end, it came down to the normal careful weight-painting and a lot of pose-space deformers for corrective blendshapes.
Next sem, I'll be teaching facial animation in class again - so I thought I might as well model another head to use as an example file [kinda getting bored with the old broken-nosed boxer model that I've been using in class for the past coupla years]. So here's Fathead - I just thought it'd be more interesting to rig/animate something with more volume and fat/muscle mass in the face, shifting around and stuff.
