Bits N Bobs

Had to tweak things today and make small adjustments....

Bum refining...

Sleeve addition...

Sole addition...


theres more i'll upload later.........

Unproductive

Didnt finish work till 6 today so was not in the mood to sit down and work. However I did spend about 20 mins during a gaming break modelling some more of the floor polisher. Its a pathetic amount of work to upload.... in fact I dont know why I'm updating you.....hardly anythings changed......a dial............and handle bars.........



Tommorow serious shits going down though.

Update

Yesterday I had a fiddle with Jeds collar in an attempt to give it more funkyness. Originally I had modelled a bog standard fold over collar, however I quickly changed my mind and decided an Elvis style stand up collar was more appropriate. The new version is much better...

OLD:

NEW:

I still need to tweak the new one as it needs a couple of overlaps and a bit of reshaping.

I then added a belt and began to create buttons for the shirt but Phil kept interuppting me and needed help 24/7 so I called it a day.

Today however I took a break from modelling Jed and pressed on with the floor polisher. I spent a good few hours knocking up the rough model reffering to orthagraphic imageplanes I set up (made using concept images). Below is my progress so far - its not much, but its a start...

I also played around with squash and stretch deformers, bends, and motor rotations. It all seemed to work perfectly! I cant wait to animate this baby...

Tongue Thursday

Today I progressed with the mouth and managed to blendshape the hardest expression - the tight closed lip. Again it was a case of rearranging vertices until the desired shape was achieved. It looks good but for some reason Maya has a glitch that unsmooths/deforms the model when two blendshapes are used. I think I can figure it out but for now its working when I apply just one blendshape...



I got a bit bored of trying to get the mouth to work properly so I went on to model the tongue and apply deforemers and blends to it. Thankfully that was alot easier....





A good day all in all....

Mouthy

I have an insane amount of shifts at the pub over xmas and so have had to reduce the amount of work I intend to get done over the holiday. Originally I wished for both Ed and Jed to be fully modelled and partially textured, however instead I plan to have only Jed fully modelled and partially textured as well as the first two chapters of my dissertation. I realised that modelling the mouth blendshapes play a siginificant part in the character build process, and therefore it is going to take alot longer to get one character complete.

So today I started testing the dreaded mouth expressions for Jed, and was actually pleasently suprised at the simplicity. I began by modelling the mouth open, allowing myself space for the teeth and tongue aswell as providing extra geometry to stretch and play with. Once modelled in its most extreme position I duplicated the head and attempted to shut it. It was a long process which involved rearranging vertices and edge loops until the jaw closed with hardly any deformation. It was a pain at first because I raised everything until several edge loops were cluttered together towards the top of the head. This was bad news as it provided a nasty movement on the back of the neck when blendshaped....

I then realised that only vertices on the front of the face need to be moved otherwise animation will occur in unwanted places. Noting this I re-modelled the closed mouth only moving the bottom lip geometry and leaving the neck loops to form an almost diagonal pattern. This resulted in a much better blend....

As you can see the second model has a much better edge flow to it, with the mouth rings in a far more effective position...

As I was on a bit of a roll I decided to model the teeth to help me understand how much space is required within the mouth, and more importantly whether or not it was looking any good...

I was going to tackle the tongue but realised the scene was in a state and so renamed EVERYTHING and tidied up the outliner...

I then called it a day after abusing Grigs. I hope to achieve a few more expressions by the end of the week, especially the fully closed lip!

XMAS is Cancelled

Christmas is over for the team now. Unfortunately we are behind and so have agreed to resume production as of today. Every Tuesday we will come into college to discuss work and update one another, except Alec who cannot make the trip. I have hopefully made clear to the guys what we need done by the start of term 2:

-Grigs: Room bock out, Jed texture tests, Room texture tests

- Alec: Life Support Machine Model complete (pipes n all), Texture tests, Bed or Plug model blockout

- Spencer: Wall texture tests, Tile texture tests, any extra models

- Simon: Machine textures, objects textures, skin textures (important)