Rig!!!

Building a custom rig !!!

For animating purposes and the use of character studio this character will need to have its own custom rig built to match the mesh.

What a rig basically its the bones in which the custom mesh is attached or skinned to so that its easier to animate with the bones instead of having to animates through polygons.

To build a rig the user must first go into CAT objects and drag out a CAT Parent. Once this is done the user can begin building their bones and the starting point would be a pelvis. Once the pelvis has been created it is placed just above the waist of the human mesh.

Now its time to add legs which can easily be done by selecting the add leg button on the rig options. a leg will appear and it needs to dragged and put into place and rule number one when creating the rig is to have it matching as much as possible to the mesh because this will help hugely  when completing a stress test.

Once the leg is in place to make the second one, Add leg should be selected again and the leg in which was edited to math the mesh will be mirrored over and should need none or minor adjustment to match the other leg. Moving on the next step would be to select the pelvis again and this time select add spine. This option creates a spine above the pelvis and can be updated to match the mesh and the amount of bones in the spine can be adjusted in the editing tools in the rig options panel.

Next step would be o creates the arm this can be done by selecting the top bone of the spine and selecting add arm to it and an arm should appear and be attached ready to the spine or shoulders. Then again just some adjustments need to be conducted so the bones match the bones and once one arm is complete by pressing add arm again this arm should be mirrored across to the other side of the body. One thing about the arms is that if the mesh has fingers the bones can be added by inputting the number of bones required on the palm of the hand and not by pressing add bone.

After completing the arms and fingers the final step would be to add the neck and head which isn’t very difficult. If the user was to select the top of the spine or shoulders the user may add another spine with fewer bones and re adjust it to match the head mesh.

This would mean that rig creating is complete. Some advise from personal experience is that make sure the bones match the rig in size and width because it will prove a challenge when skinning has to be applied. This is because certain bones wont attach to the mesh that will mean the movements wont look very smooth and further editing will have to be done.

MudBox

Mudbox!!!

Mudbox proved to be a problem for this project and one good reason would be the inexperience for the program. Since this project has a given deadline there isn’t much time to waste. Because of such a large request and the lack of experience of modeling humans and then animating them sufficient time had to be appointed to animation and the stress test.

The model was exported out of 3ds max with a UVW Unwrap applied to it but there were errors in the model that took time to re model before a better object file could be created. Once the model was exported before it was imported some research was conducted to see if the model could be sculpted and re imported into 3ds max without any problems.

From the findings of research tutorials it is not wise to sculpt a 3ds max model because if it is required for animation or gaming the sculpting will affect the polygon count which will prove more difficult to animate and take even longer to render out.

So the only thing which could be done in Mudbox is to pain the model which was fine because painting in Mudbox is adding detail in a whole new way. After painting the model the layers can easily just be exported as bump maps, which would still keep a low polygon count and have a great effect on the model.

After importing the model into Mudbox it did prove difficult to paint because the model had to be painted in certain layers and the paint panel contained a lot of shades of different colours that made it difficult to choose for example a skin colour. As a summary even painting in Mudbox proved very difficult and a lot of time was wasted trying to learn the techniques and was eventually abandoned because of deadline issues.

The model will have image textures added to it so that the models will have realistic textures added to them which give them a more of a realistic feel to them, although this was not as intended this was the only other good way to colour the models created.

Armor

Armor!!!

From the reference images in the research, which was conducted in the first couple of weeks. The idea is to give our hero a more traditional armor that is having clothing and a sleeveless armor. This will also gives us the opportunity to use another auto desk program called Mudbox.  Mudbox is a program from auto desk which allows the user to sculpt there models which is very interesting because it allows for further detail to be added to models and as long as the 3ds max files are exported out as an OBJ file format with a UVW unwrap added to it. The model can be imported into Mudbox for further editing.

Before Mudbox is used the actual armor needs to be created. The main breastplate or metal part of the shield was created using the body shape created from previous weeks. Basically the body was copied and polygons where deleted so that a simple chest plate was achieved. Once this was complete the now new chest plate had to be resized to fit onto the actual body of our hero.

One the breastplate had been resized and shaped to fit it now had to be modeled like traditional armor. This basically meant the armor had to be given a chest and abs to make our hero look more athletic and mean.

To create the chest the breastplate had to have more swift loops added to it so that closer editing could take place and have more of a smooth outcome to it. Basically the chest had to be stretched out so go across the breastplate because the reference body used to create the main hero’s body has the chest at a point.

This part of the modeling required more initiative and 3ds max experience, it was a time consuming task but the chest was modeled correctly, which gave a better base for painting in mud box. The next step was to model the base of the abs for the breastplate so that they too could be painted and sculpted within Mudbox later on.

After the armor was complete it was time to make the clothing that would go underneath it to give the armor more of an effect. This would also allow us to add more designs to the clothes and give it a more roman feel.

The clothing was created with the same concept of copying the body previously created and simply deleting polygons and simple push and pulls and extrusions. More loops where added again to give the clothing a smoother look compared to the body.

The villain would where full armor from the shoulder down to his toes because of time issues, this was basically done by taking a copy of the body and modeling it more slightly again for the chest and abs so that it would look more like armor and since they will be fighting and running the armor needs to be more fitting and less bulky.

Legs !!!!

Legs!!!

The legs are the final step of our character before the animation process begins.

The legs for the hero where created using a cylinder. This is because the rest of the character has armor on him so why not give him armored shoes to match the rest of the mesh.

To create the legs a standard cylinder was taken into Photoshop and was converted to an editable poly. Once this was done the legs and cylinder had to both be resized and the legs slightly reshaped so that the cylinder would fit onto the mesh with no distortion or overlap issues.

Once this was achieved it was time to begin shaping the armored shoes. Most armored shoes have a knee support which would prove relevance to our hero since he will be fighting enemies, also the armored shoes will save time in creating feet with toes and other detail within a foot.

Once the knee support has been shaped it was time to shape the bottom of the armored show so that it actually looked as if there was a foot in the bottom of it. Simply pushing and pulling the appropriate vert’s in vertex mode within editable poly completed this.

This will give the base of the armored shoes, this then will be the choice of the modeler if the would like to add detail to the shoes or leave them plain for possible colouring.

For the purpose of this project and hero further detail will be added to the shoes but only simple extrusions to give the shoes more depth to them and have a design without the need of further sculpting or specific colouring, the simplicity has been talked about a lot for this hero and villain project and this is because creating a character is very time consuming and because this is being created to meet a deadline, not much time is given for major detailed.

For the villains feet very simple boots where created from just pulling his leg further down and shaping his feet so that they looked more like boots attached to his legs to save further time for animation.

The legs were stretched further down to give the character the right height and give the boots more of an effect. Shaping of the foot again was simply from pushing and pulling vertices to form the feet of the villain.

Ears

Ears!!!

What’s a character with no ears, they wont be able to hear their enemies!!!

For the characters to be complete they need to have ears that will require further modeling in 3ds max. The ear is a detailed part of the head but with a few simple steps it can be created and made to look rather complicated with time.

The first step when creating the ear is to start with a standard box object in 3ds max. Once the box has been created the first step is to make the box an editable poly. Once this has been done you can then edit the box to look like a sort of bean shape, this can be done by simply adjusting the vert’s of the box in each corner.

After this has been completed its time to get out the cut tool and begin to draw the shape of the ear onto the box. This can be achieved by using reference images and doing some research on typology. The reason why the ear is created from a box is it makes it easier to draw or cut out shapes and after the ear is complete it gives a very good base or starting point for when the ear needs to be attached to the rest of the mesh.

Once the ear has been drawn it’s now time to extrude and bevel so that the ear can begin to take shape. The first part of the ear that should be extruded would be the outer rim part of the ear that gives the ear its identity. So by selecting the poly’s that needs to be extruded first and extruding them to a realistic size so the ear doesn’t look to deep. Since its in a slight bean shape some of the shape wont will be left out towards the final edge.

Once this step has been completed before any further steps are take the user should first fix up there ear and add more vert’s and or poly’s so that the ear can look a little more rounded without adding any smoothing groups or smooth’s to the ear. This will make the ear loom even more detailed when adding the smooth’s to it.

The last big step would be to bevel the inside of the ear, which gives the ear more detail. Once this is beveled its then the choice of the user if they require any further editing or if they will leave the ear as it is and add a turbo smooth.  For this project a little more editing was done to the ear to give it a more detailed look but this was manly through extrusions and the push and pull method.