Week 5

Well, I now have my first character more or less done. All the mantis still needs is a proper skin and I'd perhaps like to put it through a few more generic animations such as walk cycles just to test the skin weights etc.

This week I started work on my second, the protagonist, and its coming along well. I've managed to keep the polys at 3000 faces on its core mesh, even after the mesh smoothe, and the body's phesque has retained all of its most important forms and bulges for muschle groups.

I added a skeleton to the model today, and gave it a short test with smoothe bind witout setting up FBIK yet, just to see how the skin weights assigned. Luckily the weights shouldnt need to much tweaking once I want to finally bind the model.

In retrosoect, I probably should have done this through Unity, but I've made the gif now so here it is. This is the result of a quick little animation after the model was rigged with FBIK. I'm still not happy with the way the legs look, partially the groin, though I'm sure this is because the skeleton was attached while the legs where still each outstretched at 45 degrees. I think it can be fixed by adjusting the skin weights, but the finished mode will be wearing pants so I dont know if I'll take the time to fix something that may be deleted or might never be seen.

So I've added the aforementioned cloth to the model. At the moment the mesh was modeled manually and its behaviour controlled by nCloth. Maya 2010 seems to have dropped the old cloths system so I've had to relearn ncloth, but I'm quite liking it so far, with the exception of the cache system, but I suppose its needed or they wouldnt have included it.

All thats really left to do for this model is its face and of course the textures. I'm not sure what I should make this model look like. I'm in two worlds as to weather it should have hair or not. I know how it can really increase the size of a project to include, and the character could be a monk or something of the like, and they wouldnt have hair at all.