Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Waking Progress

Had a chat today with my supervisor about the progress of my projects. I am getting on fine with Waiting and development continues with me hoping to start animating soon. But the other project has not gotten much further forward. I am waiting to hear back on getting access to the motion capture studio which the project hinges on to progress. As such I am reluctant to put time into the development of a project that might not come to fruition. If there has been no word within a couple of weeks I will have to put the project on hold. Below are the thumbnail sketches I have done to show the type of movement that I was wanting.


Animation Update One

First go at starting the animation so I am just blocking in some rough poses and timing.

 

Monday, June 27, 2011

Reference Video

Using the list of Actions as a guide I recorded myself performing those movements to get an idea of the overall timing and of it flows together. Below are some images and videos from these sessions.







Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Action List

In preperation of starting the animation I have written out a list of Actions that I would like the character to perform. I will use this list to create some reference footage that I can then base the aniamtion on.

Walk in from the left
Stop and check timetable
Pause/Shift weight/Look
Turn to lean on shelter
Look down road
Yawn/Hand covers mouth/Look down at bench
Sits down on bench
Pause/Leg Scratch
Shifts weight - forward/back?
Zone out/ Look around
Attention caught off camera - leans forward
Super yawn - leans back and stretches
Zone out/ distracted/ thinking/ looking down
Looks back up

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Modeling the Background

In addition to creating a character to animate I also need a set for the character to be placed in. Like the before, I wanted to keep it simple so this background was roughed out with basic geometry to give me a rough idea of the layout while animating. If time allows I was add more detail to the model and also proper lighting.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Character Rigging

Roughly knowing the style of animation and what the character will and won't be doing I can make decisions on how to go about creating a rig to control the character. I have decided on a mixture of FK, IK or both depending on the body part.

I am using full IK for the legs with seperate controls for knee and heel adjustments. The bodys overall position and rotation is controlled by a nurbs circle with the spine, shoulders, neck and head being directly controlled through their individual joints using FK. The arms are a combination of FK and IK using a switch depending on what they need to be doing at the time. The Eyes are setup using aim constraints with blendshapes being added at a later date.

As you can see from the image I have now added basic materials and a textures to the model. I will talk about the details of this in a future post.





Monday, June 06, 2011

Modeling the Character

After taking the model sheets into Maya I was able to start building the character model. I decided to keep the model quite simple so I was able to create the final model quickly. One thing to note is that I have created the body and clothing as seperate models. If time allows I will use Maya nCloth for the shirt and trousers. Below is the final unsmoothed and untextured model of the character.