get crackin'

So yeah I've been attempting some `easy` shots. I decided to try some of the little bits that the Ninjas are gonna be doing at the end such as cracking the knuckles and neck, drawing swords etc.

Anyway heres an example of one I'm working on, crackin the knuckles. it kinda sucks but it's a start lol. Anyway I'll continue on with this malarky over the next few days.

Just so I can say I did

I just remembered a chat I had with Sam last night about keeping track of work, even if it doesn't get used in the final film so I figured I should just do a little post here to say what I tried to do with the hitman. You know...to show I was actually working :P

So yeah as I mentioned before I looked a lot at this film from the screenshot above, Pidgeon impossible since the dude is pretty basically textured here. He just looks more...production quality if that makes sense? I'm not sure how much of it is down to the lighting.

Anyway that's what I was going for but I don't know how to get it crisp like that. Here let it be known that I gave it my best though.

If I had kept all the other tests I did I would post them but some of them were pretty god awful and got angrily deleted :P

Stay Fresh.

JC.

UVs are BS

Better update over here. So I had put by the last part of the Ninja UVs to start texturing the Hitman/ target because we need them more. However I don't really know how to texture, I took the UVs for the Hitman into Photoshop and coloured him up a little and played with some blinns and fast skin textures on the reflective bits of the model.

After that though I was kind of lost. As far as I know Dan has told Spence to give that a go instead, which makes me feel kinda shitty but we are workin to a deadline so I understand.

Anyway I went back on the UVs to tidy up the calf and hands which as it turns out turned out to be a LOT more work than I thought lol. Still, above is a screenie of the calf I did just to test out the lining up of the calf UV's. I meant to show where the seem is but the fact it's hard to see means I did my job I guess.

Anyway it took me about 3 and a half hours to line up the seem on that one leg, and as a trade off the squares on the texture itself are not as even as they were, however I read around and apparently having the seems lined up is more important than having all those squares lined up. Unless your using photorealistic textures. Which we arn't so it should be alright.

I tested this just to show that it is workable even if not perfect so that there won't be any problems when applying a texture.

So I guess I'll work on this more tomorrow and later, and then I can get some test animations done for next monday. Tight schedule but workable.

Now I'm off to help my old man move a cement mixer.

Peace.

UVing take 2

Just checking in, I got side tracked from doing the UVs before since we had to change some things up. I had to go back on a few of the models and make some changes. That set me back a day.

Anyway been back on this for the last 2 days and it's going ok so far, by no means am I finished but I at least have an idea of what I'm doing now. I'm currently manually unfolding all the shells since I get some funky deformation when I auto unfold.

The way it stands, it's gonna take a while but It's gonna get done.

I dunno how Spence does it so fast. he's like a...a UV Ninja or something.

Anyway it's all good in the hood.

whoopsie

UV's be a messy business. As you can see. I started trying to sort out the UV's on the Hitman, however immedietly ran into a spot of trouble as the tutorial is for perfectly symetrical geometry, however, the Hitman's head is not that, due to the hair.

I worked around that, kind of. Anyway I made a start but it's proving to be a right git so I'm going to tangle with the Ninja first since he is a simpler mesh. Once I've done that I will have another pop at the Hitman since I'll hopefully have a feel for it after doing it once before.

Back to work

I was testing this base skin texture that Lewis is using on Pirates. He was kind enough to show me how it works but I never had a chance to try it properly with the dissertation going on. Since that's all done now I had a pop at it.

This one looks `ok` but this is with a simple colour an occlusion and a directional light. It's got some potential because you can play around with the specular and all kinds of funky shit.

I also just put a blinn on the shades for the sake of this render but I actually think they look pretty good with just the blinn.

I will probably play around with the settings of it a bit later and see if I can get it looking tasty, but this may be the simplest way of getting a skin on these dudes.

The month in summary

I have not posted over here in quite a while, I have been posting but most of the activity is over on the group blog. More often than not I can't be bothered to repeat myself after posting over there so I guess I'll just sum up everything that's going down in a post here.

The last post I made was before I even started the head for the Hitman so as you can see in the screenshot from above and over at the group blog he was finished a little while ago.

Since then I have been working on my dissertation and doing some research into my next jobs for Whack'd.

I started researching blend shapes but put that on hold since Ferhan seems to be taking the lead on that, I may need to help him get some expressions sorted out but on the technical side he's got it covered.

We also need to start getting this texturing done and it falls to me to try and texture the characters I built, and since I don't know much about texturing I have been researching unwrapping UV's and simple texturing. I'm also planning to look a little at bump mapping but after talking to Sam about it I'm feeling sceptical.

http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/3d-art/how-to-uv-a-character-model-in-maya-2009/

http://www.dreamflyght.com/characters/MayaTutorial/WrittenTutorial.htm

Here are some links to fairly simple if not long winded tutorials I have found to help me out, with any luck I can crack on testing out the methods over the next couple of days and I'll have something more to show.