Thursday, 1 July 2010

Thursday, 01 July 2010

Began working on Ian Elm last night, a really fun concept to work from, however there were some bugs in the mesh, therefore I exported it as a Obj and import it back into a new scene.

It took some time cleaning up the mesh again after, but its much better having a clean working mesh than problems down the line such as problems when skinning.

Anyhow here’s a clay render.



Will create a high detail model and texture the creature tomorrow. If I can create Darren Elm in another few days I should be caught up by the end of next week. But i will take a little more time on Darren's alter ego

Tuesday, 29 June 2010

Tuesday, 29 June 2010

Oops. Hair! I have added the hair to George elm this morning. Fairly simply taking the hair from George and adjusting its length and shape. I had planned to have hair flowing down his back, but to be honest the amount of time it would take to animated it, with the head movement and shoulders far out ways the effect. I could have instead added a cloth driver to the hair for ease of animation, but again feel more comfortable animating the hair by hand and therefore have opted to keep relatively the same beard as George, making it much faster to develop the character. Considering the George Elm and Ian Elm are hardly seen, in fact George Elm is seen the least, it seems unimportant to spend to long shaping and reworking hair textures and cloth drivers to add the effect of the long hair.






Monday, 28 June 2010

Monday, 28 June 2010

Textured the model of George Elm, and created all the shader’s. Luckily I can reuse the shader’s and a lot of the geometry for the characters of Darren Elm and Ian Elm. Here are some renders of the Bone jewellery and first render of the cowl, which I latter edited to use the Specular from the skin shader texture as the Specular level, to really show the dried grass in the cowl up-close.





And the final cowl



Here I have created a leaf shader originally a skin shader reedited to gain the nice back scatter effect of a leaf when held up to light. I will reuse the shader for the foliage of the environments latter.




The final model of George Elm. I tried rescaling the character to the 4mm tall version, but found a lot of problems not only in the shader, such as problems viewing the character using the perceptive Viewport, which I would use a lot during animation, (a way round this would be to use a camera and adjust the clipping but this would take a lot more unnecessary time) and also the speed of rendering is greatly increased having to work out the light of such a small object. Consequently I have decided to work on the Elms at a real world size, so George Elm will be the same size as his counterpart George etc, and compose the shots of them all together afterwards. Such as the shots of Darren and his alter ego looking at each other. Although making it slightly more difficult with timing between the characters, I think the time it takes out ways the time it would take to readjust the shader’s and cameras plus problems with animation at a small scale (they may be other ways round this which I am unaware of).

Anyway here are some renders of George Elm Final





A wire frame




And face close up

Sunday, 27 June 2010

Monday, 28 June 2010

Worked on the texture for George Elm today and the normal maps. Here are some renders of the high detail mesh, hopefully will have the model wrapped by tomorrow.






Friday, 25 June 2010

Saturday, 26 June 2010

Finished the mesh of George Elm but had a lot of difficulties, firstly in how dense I would make the mesh in accordance with detail, and trying to get the character to visually look similar to the human George.

Here’s a first clay render



A reshaping of the hips and upper legs


And a wire



I then took Georges head and reshaped its length to correspond with the Elmies, to visually alter any details to add more character and to be more recognisable as Georges alter ego.

Thursday, 24 June 2010

Thursday, 24 June 2010

I began working on the character of George Elmy last night and today. I am trying to keep the topology very clean with no triangles, and a body mesh that I can reuse and tweak for each character. I still have the rest of the arms and legs to create plus attachments. Also the skin shader will have to be reworked due to the size of the creature and the mouth shader’s. Hopefully be done in another few days. Currently one week behind, so working all I can to catch up.

The Hands I reworked fro the hands previously used, and redid the topology to be very clean