I'm excited!

This is shaping up! I've gotten most of the bodypaint done and all I have to do now is make a few changes to how the arms move and bend the fingers to look more natural. This is the stage where I'm too excited about this turning out well to refrain from rendering the scene every few minutes or so just to see it. I still have to render it, but I can probably do that tonight or something, provided I can come back and get everything done, which shouldn't take too long. This will most likely be the first final I finish this semester, so that only adds to it.

walk cycle in progress

So, I made a complete walk cycle, in that I got the legs to move in a way that at least makes sense. I'm not too happy with it so far. I mean, you can get that he's walking at a normal pace, I have done an adequate job of getting that across. But there are some subtleties that I want to add in. For starters, his body never really moves up and down. I think it would look better if his body moved slightly when he walked, but with the way I have the feet positioned, they'd go through the floor if I tried that. Also his tail. I haven't even started on the tail. I mostly just want that to form a slight wave-like motion as his body moves. And his arms don't look right at all. They look stiff and the motion of swinging back and forth according to his leg movements feels unnatural. On top of this I haven't even started bodypainting yet. I hope I can this done before the deadline.

rigging progress

So far I'm doing better with getting the IK in place. I think it was mostly the way I was setting the IK chain in the feet. I redid it differently and it's working better. Other than a few weighting issues I managed to resolve, it's looking like Arlo's ready to animate. Though maybe not. I haven't set up the IK with the hands yet, but for a walk cycle I don't think I'll be using them enough to justify doing that, and instead I'll simply rotate the finger joints if I intend to do any hand gestures. There's also the fact that I haven't bodypainted him yet, but I dunno if I should worry about that now or later. I guess it would be easier to do it before animating, so I'll work on that next time.

Weighting's done. Now it's the IK...

So uh, yeah. The weighting went pretty well. Better than I expected actually. It turned out that I had a few joints missing from the IK when I binded the character, but I just redid it with all the joints and auto-weighted and it actually works pretty well. What's not working so well however, is the IK. I think I'll have to redo all the goals and poles and rotate the model so that he's actually facing forward. Hopefully a simple redo will fix it. It worked with the weighting, so hopefully this will be a similarly straightforward process.

weighting issues already

I did a bit of work on weighting Arlo tonight. Unfortunately, there seems to be a problem with some of the joints. Whenever I move his arms, vertexes in his legs and feet move as well, though they appear to have no weight attributed to them. I'm guessing it's a joint I haven't checked yet, but I'm pretty sure I've checked at least most of them, if not all. I'm not at all surprised by the fact that something's gone wrong with the weighting this early though, I mean that was weighting is. It's finding problems in the joints and fixing them, so really I should be seeing this as progress rather than a setback. Still, solving this problem would be even better.

Rigging

I'm working on rigging Arlo now. I have a feeling somewhere down the road something will go wrong and I'll have to restart something. Probably not the whole thing, but I feel that the possibility of some sort of mistake on my part is about to happen. But who am I kidding, I always feel like that. I'm a little concerned about the deadline for this also. Rigging and weighting alone are going to take quite a great deal of work. I'm not saying I can't do it, but it does worry me.

touch-ups

Today I mostly worked on the smaller details of the model that I overlooked the other day because due to the excitement of simply having something that looked mostly unbroken and workable. There were weird dents in the crotch and wrist areas, so I made sure to correct those. I'll have to do more work on the ears, since when I activate hypernurbs, the ears looked too curved and are about half the size of the original model's. Compared to the other problems I've dealt with so far with this model, this seems like something I could sort out easily enough.