New Rig

so I spent some time with a new rig. i decided to put a lot of time into this one as i think it will greatly help the look of the animation at a later date. ive managed to get a lot of controls so i can really get a nice weighted pose. il put up a video shortly showing what all the different bits do. heres an overall idea of what it looks like though.


I stuck a hip bone in for the main reason that i can get a nice thrusting action going on.

Latest Animatic

Here is my latest animatic, ive replaced 3/4 of the animation with the 3d enviroment. Ive kept some parts to stills. I think it reads quite well now. ive added all the balls shots in flash, which was an experiment but i think it works quite nice. looking to probably do this for the final animation.

Lighting

Im still experimenting with lighting in my scene. I need to take some time over it to make sure the reflections and refractions of the equipment and mirrrors are correct. Not to mention weighing up the rendering times. All those reflections bouncing around sure to make that timer go up!
heres some initial ideas of what ive got going on.

Texturing the Gym

I wanted to get some nice reflections floating round the gym, the gym I was going for was more of a modern gym, clean, low ceiling with flat screen T.V's and loads of mirrors. I textured the changing room floors with tiles, and applied some nice bump maps to the equimpment. Texturing the Gym floor with reflective wood gave a really nice effect. Below is a few examples of the bump maps and textures I used to help create the look of leather, brick, wood and rubber.

Rigging and Skinning Sally

The rigging and skinning process was a lot easier for Sally. Mainly because I had already practiced the process with Gordon, but also because of her stance and structure, it was less complicated to skin the bones.

Here is how Sally's rig structure looked.



Sally has more of a straight back to Gordon, she has slightly more confidence, and less worried about her height. Sallys bum was really fun to skin, I wanted to create a fat kink in her bum when she walked. This I can tweak more for the final film.

Sally

Sally was used to represent the sad lonely woman who had a similar accident with steroid abuse. She is basically the female version of Gordon, and when they find each other at the end of my film, its a love at first sight scenario. They are happy together. Here is sally modeled in 3d


I gave sally the same trainers as Gordon, just a bit smaller. Almost as a separate hint that they are the same person deep down. I tried to stick to the theory that opposites attract here in regards to the shapes. It started by plainly drawing a vase shape figure and comparing the shape of Gordon to Sally. Where Gordon's shape would go out, Sally's would go in, almost like a jigsaw piece. The faces are pretty much identical, Sally's being slightly fatter at the neck and with hair, it helps bring the hole film together I feel. As you can see in the picture below, I was originally going to keep the characters to blue and pink, however changed this theory at a later date to keep with the realistic feel. Here is an example of early stages of Sally's face.


Once Sally was modeled, it was time to Give her UV's. As the shape is obviously very similar to Gordons i already knew where to make the seams and the whole process took a lot less time.
Afterwards, with the addition of paint and morph targets she was ready for the next stage.Below are some screen shots of the processes.

Sally's hair was where I decided to experiment with her, I tried a few different takes on it, but ended up sticking with this idea as I feel it works best. Simply painting on hair strands. I originally wanted to make Sally blond, however wanted to avoid the dumb stereotype that they were given, as this is not the sort of character she is. Here is how the hair turned out.

Skinning

It was time to skin Gordon, I could see straight away that how I made the arms in the rig were not going to work. I started with a hi-solver which had to be taken off as it was causing my arms to twist uncontrollably, I tried to rectify this problem however found myself getting into more indepth and complicating situations. I decided to scrap the arms, enter bone edit mode and make myself some new simple arms that just worked as independant bones. It did the trick for what i was looking for. However will change this when rigging my character propperly.

Another problem I was having was the neck, as i didnt place clavicle bones in, the shoulders, head, neck and back were being drawn totally to the wrong bones. There was only so much edit envelopes would do, therefore I had to bake the weights to the vertices and use a tool called paint weights. It basically allows you to go in and fine tune the weights to specific verts. It also gave me another reason to get my graphics tablet out aswell! Paint weights worked very well and seemed to do the trick when multiplied with another helpfull tool called blend weights. Below is a picture of the neck with horrible crimping.

Other problems I had with skinning were at the knees and elbows. They would collapse and look awfull. I used a gizmo which was made specifically for the use of knees and elbows. This helped a little but still didnt look right. Some more tweaking was needed!