Weight painting Will Again.

I had alot of Cleaning issues with my Will Model.

The Maya File had characters in its Human Ik. Not sure how i managed that. 

along with a stupid sizing issue where i never thought to actually compare the size of my models. I found will was actually bigger than Trev.

After a bit of a clean up. I was ready to start rigging and weight painting Will. 

I decided to just use a simple Human IK Rig in Will as i have remove second set of Arms From His Design. My Reasoning for this was Time Constraints and a Personal choice. 

I felt the arms would Squish the Body to much and make the arm movements a pain. 

For the most part his segmented body was easy enough to weight paint but  ran into some issues with the Neck That i am Struggling to fix. The Issue is Due to the Choice to use a human Ik Rig as i would need another joint in the neck for easier movement.

I have managed to find a work around for this with the Use of a Maya Plugin called Skinning Tools. Chloe gave this to me as she felt it could help me and speed up my process. The Smoothing and Averaging Tool, were a really big help as they allowed me to more accuracy spread the weight across the surrounding vertices.

Set Lighting Tests

I went through some lighting test today as i am reaching the point i can finally animate.

I began with some heady lighting to as I have been told it is easier to bring light down than scale it up in post.

So i started with a high exposure test shots of my first scene.

The Intensity was to High and i wasnt getting a natural looking light. I ended up trying a bunch of different exposure and intensity levels before Phil showed me How much a Good HDRI can Help with Lighting information.

I spent a bit of time finding an HDRI That was working for my lighting set up.

after awhile i managed to get one i like. I was still struggling with getting a lighting look that i liked. again phil came to my rescue with a great idea if i render my set at 2 different exposures i can use the higher exposure as a highlight for my main light.

My Idea is to render at 3 Different exposures to get a darker and lighter image i can blend in to the main render to get lighting information. 

Darker Render

 Main Light Level

 High Exposure for Highlights. 

As for the back drop i can use the same method by rendering the different depth of the forest at different exposures decreasing in brightness. I can Simulate or trick the idea of depth to the Forest.

Trev Final Tidy up

I wasn't Super Happy With my Trev Model especially his face after doing Kenny I know I can do this better. so I took it back to Zbrush and I'm so happy I did.

After Wellington, I got to go to the te papa museum and outside of the NZGDC I went to a few exhibits on display there. one was a look at New Zealand wildlife.

Here is what trev looks like now

So the face doesn't look like a tuatara and i tred to really get that triangular look of the tuatara head but it loos like a beak at the moment.

Here is Trevs New Face

So I added some flesh to his face. I was looking at a lot of 2D characters like bugs bunny, Tom and Jerry and a few others a lot of these characters have very chubby cheeks and a lot of soft rounded edges to there design. I added a lot of volume to the cheekbones and gave the neck an area of loose skin underneath to blend it on more to the neck. The detailing on the nose is a touch I am really proud of I know its subtle and simple but I think it adds a lot of character to the face

Wellington Trip

My Trip to Wellington NZGDC:

The trip to Wellington was an amazing Experience. 

Before my Explanation of what we I did and saw. 

I would Like to Thank Kathryn and Rachel For organizing this amazing opportunity for us.

I was able to meet a Hero of mine and create a very broad series of network connection that i have been following up on. 

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The NZGDC was an awesome experience i went to all of Weta games talks on Dr Gordbots

these were a great interest to me as they covered a lot of the aspect s of the gaming industry and as a new company i was able to see alot of the gripes and pains that come with game development/ 

The Gordbots Talks covered Programming and Vfx Work on the project. The VFX work was really cool to see how they used a partical system to  create ray gun effects.

Ai Learning in Games More Info:

There was a really Awesome Talk with a group that is using gaming as a means to develop an Ai. This was a really cool talk as with my internship i am dong alot of AI programming. Using some of the methodes and infromation from this talk i have begun to develop my own Ai System For animals. I am hoping that i will be able to create a Unity Package that has a group of Smart AI Animals with proper behavior habits. will have to wait till my internship presentation to see my Ai's

Fashion integration in game Design.                                          NZGDC Mentorship Program

Weight Painting Kenny

I spent this week back from the NZGDC trying to speed through getting all my characters finished being weight painted and ready to start animating.  I am also looking at Trev and his design as i am not really happy with it still.

So if i can put an initial rig in will and Kenny i can have some time to play around with trev.


Will was not much of an issue as his design is very segmented I was able to finish off his weight paint really quickly which was good cause Kenny has issues.



Kenny  caused me a range of issues in his weight paint the wings were a really bad idea 

Beacuase each feather is its own object i have to weight paint both sides this caused an issue due to me not being able to see the other side of the feathers. 

Solution:

 For the really weird shoot moff verts like above just hammering those with the hammer weights button made them easily manageable. 

I also almost put each feather on its own layer and went through turn off the visibility to the feathers around the one im working on to paint the weight evenly over the whole feather 

Looking Good 

The finger feathers didnt not like my custom hand skeleton as the last feathers from the second joint wound not line up with the modle making the feather curve like it does. gonna just corrective blend shape this thing