Week Summary - BA3b Week 8

Low-Poly Model

The next part of the process was the weight painting, which took a long time to get right. Parts like the ears and head worked well from the start, but other sections like the legs and jacket took a lot more trial and error and hence a lot more time. For the most part, everything works fine as long as the deformation isn't too extreme.

Below are some examples of the kind of posing that works successfully.

The deformation given by this weight map is still not perfect; there are issues with clipping mainly due to certain topology flows between the torso and jacket, which I don't particularly have time to fix at the current stage in the project and instead will keep in mind for my second model and any future models I make.

I made the idle animation in maya; below is it displayed with and without the skeleton visible. 

I'm very happy with the overall look of the model and animation, I'm aware that it could be more polished in places but I find it pleasantly bouncy and fun, inkeeping with the nature of the character and the game atmosphere I was going for. One thing that has been pointed out is the regularity and frequency of the ear flick in the cycle, which I'd like to come back and fix if I have the time to after getting the second model to a similar level of polish. 

Wax model

We spent this week adding the ribs and sternum, which was done using an extrusion tool to create long strips which were cut to the necessary length and wrapped around the figure. The ribs here aren't quite symmetrical, but then that is true to life and I think they look nice and clean even so. The blue sections represent the cartilage connecting the ribs to the sternum, and were added using the same method.

I learnt a lot this week about just how variable the construction of the human body is, even down to things like the amount of ribs, which one would think would be constant across people but can vary. Given that we usually only consider typical anatomy, this variation wasn't particularly something I'd considered before, other than obvious changes such as the shape of the skull or length and width of things like the limbs or torso.