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.

minor modeling snag

Well, I redid the half model to include a tail and slight moderations to the hand, but something still went wrong when I applied the symmetry. Before I did it, I made sure that all the vertexes had an x value of 0. I carefully selected each point and entered the value in the coordinates tab, and  yet parts of it overlapped when I did the symmetry. I don't know why, but there was also an extra row of polygons along the middle that I'm sure weren't there before. This model is looking good otherwise, so I really want to fix this. If it's anything like what I've been doing, I'm sure the solution to this is as simple as it is tedious.

...actually nevermind.

I just went back and tried it again. I went through the model vertex by vertex, correcting it one or more vertexes at a time and eventually got them all to line up. I was certainly right about it being simple and tedious. It may have been the most tedious part of any modeling process I've been a part of in this class, but that's alight. Arlo's model is finished, so it was worth it. I'm sure rigging and weighting is its own nightmare, but I think I've accomplished enough for this work session so that I can postpone worrying about that for another time.

Getting there...

I managed to get most of Arlo modeled today. I still have to resolve a few things though. I want to work on his hand a little more because it looks kinda off to me. I also planned to give him a tail, so I want to see if I can do that too. Also, when I made the symmetrical half, I noticed that there was a glaring line down the middle of the model. I zoomed in and found that two very thin polygons in the middle were causing it. I think I have to work on the half model and redo the symmetry in order to resolve some of the issues with it so far. But overall, there aren't that many problems here. Everything that's wrong with this model I have an idea of how to solve, so there's that at least.

Modeling

Today I managed to get the model's legs in, as well as bridging the arm to the body. I started working on his face, but I don't think I'll pay too much attention to that one just yet, since it'll definitely be one of the hardest and most time-consuming areas to work with. Also I haven't had much experience with face modeling yet, and I'm worried that the drawing I did may not translate to 3D as well as I hope. Either way, I think I made some decent progress today.

Slight modeling setback...

Ok, so when I did the modeling I realized that the cylinders I had worked with had too many rotation segments, because I was only supposed to use 10 and left it at the default 36 instead. So I'm redoing the model with less polygons, which shouldn't take too much time and make it easier to bridge the seperate elements together. Admittedly, the last time I practiced this type of thing was the ogre, and I hadn't even finished the body completely. I'm worried about how I'll do with the face and hands once I'm done with the torso and legs. I know that having hands with fingers was sort of ill-advised, but I just couldn't picture this character in mittens, so I guess I'm going for it. I'll have to learn how to model hands someday anyway.

My character so far

Ok, well I guess I wasn't as specific with my original drawing as I should've been, but it's ok because I don't think I liked the direction I was going in with the sketch anyway. I drew a character that's been in my head for a while but never quite knew what to do with. I tried doing a more realistic version of him, but it really didn't look like it had the expressive capacity of the cartoonier vision I've always had of him. His name's Arlo. His distinctive features are his long black tail and big bat-like ears. He also has a very round head, which didn't work as well with my realistic sketch. Either way, I'm sure working on this will be interesting, along with challenging as all hell, but I knew that from the beginning.

I've been working, trust me

Ok, so I've been really bad about blogging when I work out of class, and for that I apologize. I've worked three times since last class on my ogre and I've worked on the sketches several times since then, although I don't know how many times I've sat down to work on them since I've mostly been doing a little at a time. I have the body, arm and leg of the ogre modeled, but I still have to delete half and make a symmetrical duplicate, but I'm not sure what the best way to do that is. I'm also curious as to what we will end up animating with these characters we're creating. Will it just be a walk cycle/gesture like the yokai project or will we be planning out a more complex sequence of events? Just wondering what to expect from this next project I guess.

modeling and stuff

2D and 3D are both difficult to work with in their own way, but both of them combined is going to be a very different type of challenge, I can tell already. Modeling the ogre is going well overall I suppose, but the fact that I'm not able to allign the model with both the front/back view and the side view bothers me. I guess it doesn't matter so long as the finished model looks at least similar in form to the drawing, but I still can't help but think there's something I'm not doing right. I'm still not sure what I'm doing for my character, but I'll certainly be thinking more about it as the weekend progresses.

Slight render problem...

Last night I attempted to start rendering my animation at around midnight and leave it there until I got back, but when I logged onto the render account, Cinema 4D wouldn't start because it said the serial numbers were incorrect. I didn't want to just leave my account open, so I decided to go this morning and render. Unfortunately, I woke up a little later than expected and it's clear that my animation will not be ready by the time today's class starts. In fact it's 11:30 and the animation's not even halfway rendered. I'm not sure what can be done about it at the moment, so I'll let it render for as long as I can and see what happens.

Mostly finished. Also computer troubles

I think I've got the animation about where I want it to be, though I'm not going to try to render it until I know that this computer's going to remain unoccupied for an extended period of time. It took like half the class to render 100 frames, and this animation is over nine times that. I didn't have too much else that I could do during this time, so I tried to open Final Cut Pro so I could finally get around to adding sound to my droid animation, and sure enough, it won't open. Fortunately, Final Cut Pro seems to work on other computers, so all I'll have to do is transfer the file to another working volume so I can edit that. The same will go for my yokai animation if it still doesn't work on this machine by the time I have the movie rendered. There was also some slight trouble with logging out, so I get the feeling that I might not have chosen the most reliable computer in the room. Either way, it's certainly nothing I can't work around.

I think I got this...

Well, I figured out the gestures and I think I have all of the animation done, or at least most of it. I might add more to the wave gesture because it seems kind of stiff. The only thing that moves is his hand, so I think I can get more of the body to move so it looks a little more natural. Other than that, I'm basically ready to render. I have a pretty decent amount of effects in this animation, and it's my longest yet, so I have to assume it'll take a while to render. I'll worry about that later though. Right now I'm just glad that I could finally get this into some sort of finished state that I'm ok with, even if this isn't the end.

I need sleep...

I'm still trying to establish what I'm doing with my character. I know that after the walk cycle it'll do something, but I'm still playing around with what that is. I'm a tad sleep-deficient at the moment, so I couldn't stand to do much today, but I am at least closer to figuring it out.

A general success

I guess this took me a while, but I think I'm officially proud of my work so far. I've managed to create a walk cycle for my creature today, as well as create the environment and play around with how it renders. I'm actually pleased with how it turned out, which isn't easy. It still needs work though, obviously. I think there's a bit of a problem with the weighting on one leg, and I didn't really add a joint in the thumbs, so perhaps I'll play around with it to see if I can add them in, if I find it necessary for what gesture I will end up making my character do. Either way, this was a good day for me and I'm glad things are finally starting to work.

rigging the elephant thing

I started rigging the yokai, but I can't keep everything organized. Every time I try to rig this thing I forget something and everything gets crazy and I can't keep track of anything. Then again, that's kind of the case with everything I touch, so I can't say this surprises me. I'll get it worked out eventually though. Also I finished the droid rendering, but have yet to add sound. Again, this shouldn't be too hard.

Weighting a cat, and also the project

So, I worked on weighting today. I can't say I'm looking forward to that step in the process of my future projects, but it's beyond my control, so in the meantime I'm at least trying to get my head around it like many perplexing semi-unfamiliar challenges in this class before it. I am worried somewhat about the Yokai project. I admit that I haven't thought quite as much as I should've so far about this. I have a few sketches of things I may or may not be able to figure out how to model, but as far as character design beyond the visual realm goes, I'm not so sure how I'll do. That character sheet scares me more than a little. Just looking down the list of character attributes, I even found it hard to come up with answers regarding my own characters I've had for years, let alone a character I just made up for this project, don't even have a name for, and don't even have the physical appearance fully decided yet. These things will come eventually, or I'm hoping at least, but for now I'm a little concerned about how I'll handle this project.

Droid walk cycle and texture wackiness

Well, I got the droid to animate just fine, but what I couldn't get past was trying to figure out how to apply a seperate texture to the eyes. You'd think that creating a walk cycle would've been the hardest part, but if it's anything I've learned about the nature of difficulty with this kind of work, it's that sometimes the hardest things are the things you think can be done fairly simply. Then you try it and realize you don't know exactly how to do something but thought you had a good idea of how to go about it. Still, I'm not too worried, it doesn't make that much of a difference at the moment.

Droid animation

So, building and rigging the droid was a challenge. I have to wonder if I'm the only one who has this many difficulties with the process, I feel like I should've figured this out more quickly than I did. I dunno, I'll get this eventually but right now it's a bit frustrating. At least the droid's ready to animate now.

Uncanny Valley

So, I listened to the uncanny valley podcast. It was pretty interesting. I'm certainly familiar with the concept of the uncanny valley, it comes up a lot when talking about modern video games. Most characters in realistically rendered games fall into this valley for one reason or another. It's usually something subtle. For example, I found many of the characters in Batman: Arkham Asylum a little off, mostly because of the eyes I think. Other characters, like the Joker, were alright because the Joker's facial features are exaggerated enough that the not-quite-real factor didn't really come into play. I want to say there was something slightly off about Batman in that game as well, but I won't because...well, because it's Batman.

Rendered and edited, basically

Most of my time was spent getting down the basics of rendering and adding sound in Final Cut, a program I've used sparcely, but wouldn't say I'm familiar with exactly. That's ok, it wasn't that hard. The exported video came out ok, so I'm not worried about my lack of Final Cut experience, at least not yet.

Animated a cylinder, now what?

At least my second attempt at making things simple was a success. I managed to animate a cylinder jumping through a hoop. Now I just have to render it before next class. Might be a little difficult because I'm going home this weekend and won't have access to these computers for most of the weekend, but getting here and rendering before next tuesday shouldn't be too hard.

Cylinder trouble

Well, this figures. One of the few times I try to keep things simple and I end up running into all sorts of complications. Apparently, curling up end-to-end is a difficult task for a cylinder with only four joints, so I tried to make more but it still wouldn't work. So I tried making a slightly incomplete torus and using a skeleton to straighten it out. It looked kind of awkward unraveled as a long semi-straight tube, so I tried using a shorter and thicker torus instead. Then one end was weighted to the other and I had to go to the weight tool to separate the two ends, but it still doesn't solve the problem of not really being able to hop. I'm thinking of cutting the hopping part out, or just doing something different. If I end up doing something with the regular hopping cylinder instead, I could just make it jump through a hoop or something. I already know how to make the hoop. I spent all class familiarizing myself with that shape.

"My Son is Killing Me" response

I listened to “My Son is Killing Me,” and I have to say that it was interesting to listen to. As a gamer who's been playing games since the mid 90s, my perspective on gaming as a whole is vastly different than that of Nicholson Baker, who has only started playing videogames recently. I find it a little hard to relate to his experience playing games like Call of Duty, since violence has never really been an issue for me in the past with that game. In a way it becomes more like drawing something from observation, in that it requires that you break down what you're looking at to an arrangement of lines, shapes, and how they relate to each other on the page. Likewise, playing a game like Call of Duty is simply a matter of speed, timing, and location, along with precision and mastering the tools and weapons necessary to advance. The violence itself doesn't generally reflect gamers' opinions on actual violence in any way. This has been doubted and defended countless times over gaming's lifespan, but in the end, violence in videogames is used to create challenge and to adequately suit the mood and setting the developer was going for.

And when they discussed writing in video games, I was mostly thinking of how different the job of video game writing must be from anything else. Videogames are an interactive media, which means the story unfolds in a different way, one which can't simply be described to the player like a book, or have every scene planned out to play out in a specific way like a movie, since the player is actively involved in the scene in many cases. Many games try to be movies in terms of their narrative, but miss the point because the games with the best writing involve direct player involvement in the storyline, as opposed to watching cutscenes, with the gameplay only being the action that follows. There's a lot to think about in video game writing, and this has definitely gotten me to think about it a bit more.

Cylinder planning

Well, I think I can assume that since this is the first animation of the class we're not expected to get too intricate with our first animation, which suits me fine because my fear of being the only one unfamiliar with the software has not yet subsided. My roughly sketched plan involves the cylinder jumping forward a few times, curling up, and rolling off a ramp. I haven't gotten into figuring out which action is going to be longer than the other, since without the software, I can't really get a sense for what it would look like until I'm there. I can adjust the frames easily enough anyway, so all I have to do is figure out how to animate it.

First 3D class

So, I start this class and one thing I'm reminded of rather frequently is that I'm the only one unfamiliar with this software. That's interesting. I have done some work with similar 3D applications, but it's been a long time since I've done this kind of work. I did manage to get the cylinder animation working, even if I did get it figured out way after everyone else did. I'm nervous about officially being the least experienced person here, but what else is new? I think I'll figure it out though. Eventually.