The scene is set, well one of the scenes

I have been working on the school scene these past few days and was planning on keeping it simple. In true Chris Cook style I have over killed it, fire alarms & sprinklers, door numbers and room names, lockers, street lamps, interactive white board..........everything a good school needs (just the children to go!)

The lockers and the marble floor are total over kill as this scene too 1:19 to render on the uni Mac's, add a character and render times are going to be long, but I will persevere.

On the interactive whiteboard I am going to have a teacher write up the title of the animation. For this I intend to make an animated material in Flash and us it in here, more onm this as I create it.

I now need to get on and add the child and teacher to this scene. Tune in next week all.

Inca Hanan clothes

Here is an idea of how I want my inca Hana to be dressed. I like the shoulder pads witht he open torso as it sugests he is strong ang powerfull, he has no need for armour because he is allmighty. this is a still form the film apocalypto:





In modelling the clothing I am also going to draw from the three pictures below in creating the clothing and the war paint.

Skinning and boning at last (although its not been as easy as I had hoped)

Where to start? How about the beginning?

So as you are all aware I have finished modelling the Inca Hanan and he now need the means to be animated.

Boning.

I have decided to use a biped as I have not used one of these before for my animations (at least not in the proper way). Here is where I noticed my first problem, a long time ago I had added a mesh smooth to the character which caused problems with the symmetry, turned out the best way to solve the issue was to collapse the stack and weld vertices together, I now have a man at 200,000 polys and believe me when I say it is slow going getting this all done, lesson learned, never collapse the stack until you are done. Moving swiftly past my, errrm, error, I have got the full joints in my character so my biped has them all too.

Boning turned out to be the easy part, as my model is defiantly a symmetry I simply lined up the left hand side of his body, then using the copy and paste opposite pose option I cloned the pose over. Done.

Skinning.
Now the hard part, First off I set some keyframes 10 or 20 keys apart of the biped moving the arms and legs up and down so that during the skinning process I can jump to various poses to see how the mesh is deforming. Problem 2 was that when I moved to the first pose this happened.

It looks like the skeleton’s soul is trying to pull away. This problem took me hours to figure out but I eventually opened up the weights table to look at all the (200,000) vertices to see what was affecting them all. Turns out one of the fingers was affecting every single vertex. As you can see from below, with the finger selected none of the body should be affected but, it is affecting the weight of almost every one, strongly too.

Somehow the envelope for this bone ended up miles away from the body, encompassing everything. (That’s the body in the middle, just really far away).

Once I had this problem under wraps the rest fell in to place with relative ease, it was simply a case of resizing envelopes and adding drifting vertices to their relevant envelopes.

Now, from the next image you can see that the shoulder is not deforming correctly, I have tried and tried to fix this problem but it will just not have it so I am going to cloth over it to hide it, cheap fix to a problem I know but its week 7 and I really need to crack on with this. Finally, from the same image you will notice the left shoulder (his left) has a crease down it, this is because I have not changed the vertex weights on the left, I am going to mirror them from the right using the mirror panel in the skin modifier settings.

Wooohooo, done (I hope)

Right, let me tell you a little story, a story about a man created in 3D max then max decided TO TEST MY PATIENCE!!!!!!!!!!

So as you are no doubt aware I have been modelling a high resolution character for my animation, muscles and all ( I was going to tell you about the nails but well let’s face it that is boring and you all know how to do it. They were modelled as separate objects, cloned and attached to the body mesh but remain their own element.). I have had no end of problems with this. I managed to get all the pollys flowing in the correct directions and a lot of definition after two solid weeks at it, it has been a long slog.

The problems

First off I had to keep detaching different parts of the body to turn it all around and then re-attach them all, this would have been easy if it was not for the fact that I created the character so small that the weld tool welded the whole model together if I selected all the vertices, let me explain this a bit. As I created him small, the distance between the vertices is so small that even the smallest weld attempt pulls in all the vertices around it. When using the scale tool to make the character bigger you do not actually change the distance between the vertices, merely a sort of zooming the scene in to (it’s complicated but it’s true, this is why you should not use the scale tool to resize objects). Anyway, the problem. I had to weld all the vertices one by one. Below in the fingers you can see lines in them, this is where the mesh is detached, I manually attached them one by one.

Next problem came with the symmetry tool. For reasons I am not even going to try to pretend to understand the symmetry tool was doing this to the mesh.

After hours of trying I could not solve the problem and again had to resort to the long and boring process of manual welding. Long! You will also notice that his nipples have disappeared, this was caused by an earlier smoothing process, these needed to be rebuilt. Below is an image of the weld tool on a very small setting ruing all my work.

Problem 572! After sorting the welding on everything and building new nipples this happened to the nose, again I have no idea how bit it was too late to go back, it needed to be solved from here. My problem was that the cut tool was not working and I struggled to get the holes filled. Paul spent ages helping me trying to 'trick' max to create new pollys. This involved creating a polly, slicing it in half, deleting a quarter and redrawing a new quarter. Cheers Paul.

Smoothed he is 264,298 pollys, but looking good. Just as well the uni has the new 8 core Mac's for rendering, if they could only sort out the backburner render farm were well away.

Anyway it is now done and he is ready to be rigged, this is going to go wrong I can smell it.