Also got a good chunk of the robot's scenes animated. I'm getting excited about my project again, yay! Animation can really take it out of you, but there's nothing like seeing hard work pay off.
I'm in the process of weight painting on Lani's rig. For those of you non-animators out there reading this (hi mom!), rigging is the process by which you make the controls for a 3D character to be able to move. Think of the 3D model as a puppet, and the rig is like the strings you can use to pose it. You build a simple "skeleton", and then attach controllers to each joint in places where you want it to move, like the fingers or the feet. Of course it gets a lot more technical and involved than this, but that is the general concept.
Weight painting refines these controls by determining which parts of the character's body can be influenced by each particular bone. For example, when Lani bends her knee, her leg gets kind of squashed and folded as though she had no muscles in there! Remember that part in the 2nd Harry Potter movie when Harry breaks his arm at a Quidditch match and Professor Quirrel tries to "help" by casting a mending spell, but instead makes his bones disappear and Harry's arm flops around all gross-like? It looks something like that...
As you can see in the picture, her shoulder pivots at an angle that is a bit too sharp, and weight painting is the process by which I can smooth that out and make it look more natural. It can be a long and tedious process so I'd better get to work now.... hope to have some more progress updates soon!
Lani Rig is inching closer to completion. I didn't quite get her hair the way I wanted to, but she'll probably be wearing a helmet in the final version anyway. I am itching to begin animating her!
Here is a render of my current set! It's about 90% modeled, texturing and lighting to come soon. I'm happy to say that at least I've made more progress on the set of my film than in anything else. Animation is at a standstill thanks to my main character's rig being broken, but hopefully I will get some help with that soon.
Here are the completed paintings from last semester's digital illustration class. They really helped me to come up with a final design for Lani and Mr. Robocop here, which are on their way to being fully-realized 3D animated characters. I am working on them today, but sadly Maya does not come as naturally to me as drawing does so they don't look as great as I wished they did. :(
This is also my first ever attempt at any sort of painterly illustrative style, digital or otherwise. I'm sure it shows. Some of them are more unfinished than others, but I'm basically satisfied with how much I've learned the past few months.
I really want to buy a Cintiq now - I got to use one in the lab while working on these and there's really nothing else like it. I think I've gotten spoiled, because now regular tablets just feel awkward.
I'm a visual art generalist who does graphic design professionally full-time, animation/3D modeling as a freelancer, and sculpture/illustration as a hobby. I use both digital and traditional methods for a wide variety of projects.
You can expect to find everything from work in progress photos to finished pieces to tutorials to ruminations on living the creative life. Thanks for visiting!
