Well I officially graduated from CDIA on Saturday. Very exciting and all that. The ceremony was actually quite nice and the key note speaker was pretty interesting, even if one of the other speakers compared all artists to prostitutes, which was a bit odd (if possibly accurate- still odd). As per usual, I brought a pen since I inevitably get bored at this sort of thing, and one should always be prepared to doodle.
Worked on a new character design which I may do more with. so that’s good.
Also my portfolio website is all up and running, demo reel/technical project reel and everything. In case anyone who reads this, doesn’t read any of my other media portals.
also, here’s the link in case that doesn’t work for whatever reason.
lip sync (work in progress)- of mortimer. Audio is from Doctor Who. Just mapping out his key poses and starting on some of his in between. No actual mouth movements yet (and yes, i realize he doesn’t actually have lips )
finally done rigging mortimer for the most part (for the second time…oy). Working on setting up some fur systems for him and finalizing things. We have a turntable and a walk cycle due this week, so you know.
Sorry, been busy uv-ing stuff- too busy even to update! Mortimer’s turned out to be a pain in the butt to uv in maya- doable, but annoying, so I’m going to try to use Head Us to do his uvs.
So I started a second character (her name is currently Kieve)- she’s from a race of desert cat-people- so right now she’s kind of bare (literally), but will be modeling armor as separate pieces. But here’s her wips:
some concept art for my character (we’re going to do them in 3d soon), Mortimer. He’s a bird dog (so gryphon but back half owl, front half dog, with bits mixed up together). He started out being more traditional border collie-ish, but I think now i’m going to go with making him a little smaller (almost lap dog size) and i really like having his back half be owl, so I may stick with that. I think as a character too, he’s going to have a small owl/dog personality- thinks he’s bigger than he is.
(the usual- click the thumb for the full size image)
Some of the lighting isn’t quite there yet, but it’s looking a lot better! Remind me next time I want to do a needlessly complicated scene…well not to. Won’t be able to do a full fly through (I don’t think), as maya freaks out if all the layers are on at the same time…sigh.
Spent the afternoon working on the pelvic back limb of a dog (or similar- this one is looking a bit more like a bear leg, which are actually plantigrade, but do have the reverse knee business). About have it, though could probably use a more realistic model (I pretty much did this one on the fly and it deforms kind of funny). Also needs some tinkering. But this is what I have for now:
I added an extra joint to the ankle (so there’s a real ankle and there’s a fake ankle) and then did an IK handle from the hip to the real ankle & then a second one from the hip to the fake ankle- basically for the sole purpose of constraining the knee further. Then I set up the rest of the leg as you would for a human leg, but moved some of the pivot points around. i also added the phalanges roll (which rolls off mid toe). Still a work in progress.
Well not necessarily a *dog* leg, but for any creature that has a digitgrade leg (walks on its toes) and the reverse elbow in the back. I haven’t quite figured out how to rig the pelvic limb (it has the double knee, maybe work on that this afternoon), but I think I’ve about figured out the front leg. Obviously the model I’m using is just rough and probably needs some tweaking as far as the deformations go (I also have to figure out a mel script to do the claw curl without having to move them each individually), but it’s looking pretty good so far.:
Basically, I treated the “leg” as a combination of hand/arm & leg (as you would in a biped rig). The hand joint (technically there is no “hand” joint- but in rigging it’s used to keep all the finger/toe joints steady) is functioning as a toe joint would in a human rig. Then I used the toe tap, peel heel, toe pivot (claw), foot roll & heel twist the same as you would in a human rig. The Ik handle for the elbow actually goes from the “shoulder” joint to the ball joint (instead of to the ankle). The foot ctrl controls all of the paw/leg movement, save the individual claws (which are controlled by the hand ctrl).
Apparently this is strange, but I really like rigging.
Well here we go. First post and all. Hopefully, I will be faithfully updating (as in every other day or so) with all the new stuff I’m working on (or have been working on)
To start you out, here’s the little ball guy animation from last week’s deliverable. The assignment was to do a regular walk cycle, and some other kind of walk/emotion. My server doesn’t seem to want to let me upload my walk cycle, but here is the stair master ball guy (also known lovingly as “chicken legs”): TMcKenna_chickenlegs_stairmaster_noctrls
This is from our previous big project- in which I combined both 2D & 3d Animation. There’s no music as yet (though my composer friend indicates that he might have a chance to get to it this week). The environment was modeled & textured entirely in Maya, utilizing the toon shader (and layered textures, and hours upon hours of work to make it look like toony rock…), while the animals were all hand drawn (by yours truly) in photoshop & put together with the 3D in flash. It took a long time.
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