Thursday, 19 August 2010

I am pretty much half way through the skinning of George Elm. It’s a hard process, using paint weights more than individual vert weighting to keep the organic shape. With it being a denser mesh and unclothed it makes it more difficult to produce a good system of weighting. I have added muscle bones to the top of the legs, pecks, lats and traps which give a deformation of those areas, and also allow the character to sit crossed legged. The cowl I had some problems with (due to the density of the mesh it was near impossible to skin the same as the main character) but eventually realised I could create a copy of the base mesh skinned, delete the unwanted areas and use that as a driver for the cowl using skin wrap. Therefore the cowl follows the movements perfectly. I also skinned the jewellery, adding just one weighting corresponding to the top of the jewel, so it appears as though it is hanging down when moving. Its not perfect, for more realism perhaps a way of making the jewellery bang and bounce along across the chest would have been better, but with my limited knowledge it works just as well.

Anyhow no renders today its late on and it would just bore. .