Still Rigging Thomas...No Walk Cycle Yet!

Hey guys,

Well, it's been a pretty busy week, and with Halloween getting closer (a very important holiday in my family with a huge, elaborate front yard cemetery that requires considerable building every year) it is only going to get busier.

Still, I will not stop working on the movie but may slow down a bit, as was the case this week. I'm still not working on a walk cycle yet because I'm ironing out the rough spots in the Thomas model rigging. This is very time consuming but once I get it finished it will be easier to position and pose the models.

I mentioned last week that by doing this I was able to improve upon the models. One of the things I mentioned is that I will be able to get rid of the "shoulder pads" on the models and below is an example of what I was talking about...




As you can see in the second picture, Thomas' shoulders look much more relaxed and natural. I was also able to fix his hands, which is something I was never happy with and was able to fix with the Rocky model. The hands in the second pic come from a separate model I created for the Rocky model and imported them into the Thomas model, then beefed them up to look like a boy's hands. A huge improvement in my opinion.

All I have left to finish rigging is his legs and feet and once I complete that I will finally be able to work on the walk cycle.

As soon as I have that finished I will post it.

Later!

So Far... So Good!

Well, I had a pretty productive day today.

I was able to fix the Thomas model by rebuilding his arms so they stick out in a "T" shape. Check out the before and after...

(Before)


(After)


As you can see, I was even able to redo the UV Textures which gives him his color. If you look closely you will see the pattern on his pants is a little different.

The other thing you will notice is that he no longer looks like he's wearing shoulder pads. This will be more noticeable after I rig him and put his arms down by his sides (something I will show you after I rig him) but for now, if you use your imagination, you will see what I'm talking about.

So, not bad for a days work. It actually only took me a couple of hours. The big thing will be rigging him, which I will hopefully be able to spend some time on tomorrow. I say "hopefully" because this weekend is going to be very busy and I'm not entirely sure I will have the time until next week.

As always, I will keep you posted.

Back to the Drawing Board on the Human Characters!

Well, I mentioned last week that I was certain I would find problems with the models when I started to animate them and I did...at least as far as the human models go.

To make a long story short, when I was building the human models I didn't have their arms out to the side (so when you look at them from front or behind they look like a "T").

Why is this a problem? Well, because they are wearing shirts and when I move the arms the shirt sleeves become deformed.

It's all pretty complicated if you're not familiar with the rigging process so I won't beat you down with the details. The bottom line is I have to rebuild the human models with their arms out, which will completely wipe out the color maps I've done taking me back at least another week to fix all three human models (Thomas, T-Boom and Rocky).

And I was in such a good mood last week.

The good news is that I believe this will only be a problem with the human models. As you know, Max and Gibson are wearing costumes when they are Xam and Power Dog, but because I built them standing on all four limbs they should be alright. At least I'm crossing my fingers that will be the case.

So, what does this mean? Well, it means if my estimation of a one week delay is accurate then it will be a couple of weeks until we see T-Boom in a walk cycle.

As always, I'll keep you posted.

Having Fun Rigging the T-Boom Model!

Hey guys!

Well, I still have a lot of work to do before I feel I'm done with rigging the T-Boom model, but I did have some fun working on posing him and thought I'd share.

First, Here is what it looks like to work with the rigging and then to render the image...



Second, I decided to have some fun with the rendered image and stick T-Boom on a statue of a Charging Bull that sits somewhere in NY City (where the movie is set)..



I plan on adding the rest of the characters to this pic as I finish them.

That said, I'm still not done with T-Boom. I'm going to try to animate him in a walk cycle to make sure I have everything right. I already can tell there are things still wrong with what I've done so far so I have no idea how long this will take. I suspect it will be another week until I have the walk cycle finished.

As always, I'll let you know how that goes!

Started Rigging T-Boom!

Hey guys!

Well, I said it would be a learning experience and I wasn't kidding.

I decided last week to scrap everything I've rigged on Power Dog and start over. That said, I didn't find a lot of rigging tutorials for dogs but I found a fantastic tutorial for rigging a person so, after a week of research, I've finally started rigging T-Boom today!

Rigging looks pretty funny when editing and positioning. Here is what it looks like (click on the image for a larger pic)...



As you can see, T-Boom has little yellow bones and the dots represent his joints. This took me about an hour to do and it has it's challenges but so far it is really moving along.

Next I have to assign what bones move what part of the body. I think that is going to go fairly quickly but I am completely exhausted and think I will stop here for the day. It's gonna be a pretty busy day tomorrow, but I'll try to work on it some more in the evening and hopefully I'll have something new to post then.

For now, I'm pretty excited and I can't wait to work on this some more.

As always, I'll post if there's anything new to report!

What's New?

What's new? To tell the truth, nothing.

I've been a little under the weather this last week and haven't touched the movie.

Not to worry, next week I'll start it up again. I've decided to start over with the character rigging. I'm going to scrap what I've done so far and begin researching the process anew.

I'm doing this because if there's one thing I've learned from all the work I've done on the movie is that I can always do it better and more efficiently.

So, next week I'll start my research and I'll update you on how it's going.

See you then!