Character Test 3!

Hey guys,

I've spent the last couple of days working on the third and final character for the side project I'm working on.  His name is Dr. Huffenagle and he is the villian of the movie.

The reason it has taken a couple of days is because the first day I spent cleaning up the model, fixing they eyebrows (like I had to do with Jimmy and Nathan) as well as figuring out a way to make his trench coat work.

Besides the fact trench coats are cool, I wanted him to wear a coat because Thomas/T-Boom wears shorts that are constructed the same way as Dr. Huffenagles jacket and I was having trouble getting the shorts to move with the characters legs.

Well, it turns out the fix for the jacket (and by default T-Boom's shorts) was staring me right in the face.  I won't go into boring details but trust me, it was a simple fix.

Back to Dr. Huffenagle.  Once I got his trench coat figured out the problem became how to make it blow in the wind (very important for Power Dog's cape) as well as how flexible do I make it?

The flexibility comes from the material modifier I use.  The first one I decided to try was cotton.  I  know, an odd choice for a trench coat, but I wanted something that would really blow in the wind.

So, here is a test video with a cotton modifier...

As you can see, this clearly looks like a cotton trench coat and although it blows very easily in the wind it looks really light weight and more like a robe than a jacket.

So, I decided to try a leather modifier.  The problem with that was that the jacket hardly moved in the wind.  It turns out I really had to try several different setting with the leather modifier until I finally found one I like. 

Here's a test for the final settings I chose...

I know, that is very subtle movement.  The truth is, I really had to lighten the leather's mass and stiffness as well as seriously kick up the wind to get it to blow that much.  The truth is, leather jackets really don't have that much give and by default don't really blow around in the wind.  I found that anything more than what is seen in the test video just didn't look like leather.  So, these are the setting I plan on using in the scene.

Now that I got that out of the way, I will probably do one final character test with the doctor.  I won't be breaking any new ground, but it will give me one more opportunity to practice my lip sync technique before I move on to my next problem.

I'll share that next problem with you after this last character test.  Today is Thanksgiving (Happy Thanksgiving by the way), so I have no idea when that final test will be completed.

Check back in a week...