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.