Advanced Tech

Soooo… the trouble with a busy, manic course is that there is no time around the work to actually keep this blog up to date. Looks like I may have to try and set myself a time once a week to sit down and make blog posts. However, since I have found an oppurtunity today, I shall take full advantage of it.

The rest of the first two advanced tech course works involved modelling a realistic hand in one week and then rigging, skinning and texturing it the next week. To practice skinning techniques we also had to rig and skin our bug in another 24 hour session. Needless to say, it was a pretty intense couple of weeks. Still, the modelling side of things turned out pretty well. I struggled at first while trying to get my head around the idea of “edge loops”. This basically means keeping the flow of the edges around polys moving nicely around the model and trying to ensure there are as few as possible, so that they actually just loop around and connect in various places.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llc_HBCn_7U]

Skinning and rigging the wasp turned out to be a real struggle due to a few mistakes made during my modelling process. As I had modelled the legs quite bent, it was impossible to make them straighten nicely with the rig. Also, thanks to a lack of edges around the leg joints the bends were very untidy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbyshtMxnpg]

Having completed the wasp, we moved on to rigging and skinning the hand. This went very well and I had it mostly completed on Friday before stumbling across an error. One of my tutors helped me to find a work around for the problem and a way to reload all my work on to the rig after the fix. This worked great on the Friday. However, I came in on Monday expecting only a small amount of skinning left to do only to find that the fix I had been shown on Friday had now deleted all my work and I had to start again from scratch. Unsurprisingly I was absolutely gutted and this seriously affected the quality of my skinning. There were several errors I failed to notice in my rush to get everything complete and I watch my deformvideo now with frustration that the deforms are so much poorer than my first attempt.

We also then had to texture the hands. Rather than using photoshop, we used procedural texturing, using various noise algorithms to create the random colour changes etc that you see on skin.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYKauIBOgUE]

Finally, once the hand was rigged we also needed to pick a final pose and animate the hand moving into this pose.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMJ464pNdCo]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJMwAmXWexY]

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