Turntable Animation

Heres my turn table animation for my Character. YouTube sucks and took aaaaaaaaages to upload it but its finally up there. Enjoy.

My three final poses...

This pose shes meant to be jumping like a lemur does when they run around, although in some angles she looks like she is doing Kung fu, this was the easiest of the three to pose.

This is a more relaxed pose from the first. I wanted to do a natural pose to make her more human than Lemur.

 My final pose. I chose a crouch to add variety, I also gave her a spliff, it can just about be seen in her hand, she is a pot head after all.

Model Complete

Hes a quick render of my final version of my character. I added some trees in the background to add a bit of detail. Over all I'm very happy with how she turned out. There are a few things in which I'd change but for my first attempt I'm happy.

I'd like to add more texture to her at some point, I'll need to learn more about texturing before I do so I can get an even texture throughout.

I'd like to tweak the model and bit and add more like the hood that I had originally planned, but with a poly count on the brief I needed to stay under so I had to sacrifice a few things.

Rigging

This is a pain, I had no idea how to rig and from what I was told it was very difficult to do.

Now seeing as this project was only to provide a model I made my self and 3 poses, I was allowed to use a pre-made rig rather than make my own.

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/character/c/-rapid-rig-basic-for-maya--2

I used that rig in the end, I had a few others but my knowledge of rigging and MEL script is very limited, that rig there was simple to use and came with a a tutorial in how to set it up.

I didn't rig my character amazingly, I wasn't sure where some of the locators went, but it was enough to mover her around, it just took longer than usual.

Texturing

 This was the part I dreaded the most. I knew it would take the longest.....and it did.

 This is the UV map for the main body. I decided to do Automatic Mapping for this, this was the most organised of the mappings I could do, I had to painstakingly colour each bit and figure out where each of the smaller bits went on her so I didn't colour them the wrong colour.

It took a while to say the least.

I had to go back a number of times and re-colour bits because I got muddled up on all the small bits. I know there is a much easier way to do it, but I had such trouble doing it and Automatic Mapping was the easiest in such a short time frame, next time Id make sure Id left enough time to texture and unwrap my model, I need to research it more and this was really my first time texturing.

 This is the Face UV map. I chose Cylindrical Mapping for the face, this unwrapped the face mesh so it was flat for me to paint, I darkened the areas around her eyes so shed have bags, I also darkened the ears to make them look a little different and give them some volume.

This is the UV map for the hair. I used Cylindrical Mapping, same and the head. This mapping produced the best result. I changed the hair colouring a bit. rather that it being all yellow, I made the edges yellow.

 This is the UV map for the eyes, I used Spherical Mapping for the eyes, it seemed the most logical choice for the eyes seeing as the are spheres,I added the pink for the blood shot eyes shes meant to have, I didn't do the pupils because they were separate spheres so only had on sold colour.

This is the UV map for the skirt. I used normal mapping for this, I found a small tartan texture online and then took it into Photoshop and tiled it for my skirt, I thought this pattern was the best out of the ones I found.

Overall I went for simple colours and textures, mainly because this is my first big texturing project as well as modelling. I'm a lot more confident with texturing now, perhaps I'll come back to this character and put different textures on her. The other reason is that the brief asks for a clay-mation type of texture, so I kept it simple.

3D Print

These are the images of my 3D print. she came out a lot better than I had expected. She was a lot bigger than was I expecting. She needed sanding but she was still very delicate so I have decided to leave her as she is so that I don't break her.

Heres a side view of the model. I had to hold her because her base wasn't entirely flat and he head was very heavy so she didn't stand up on her own. You can see the comparison in size of the bust and my fingers.

I am very pleased with how she turned out, I would like to paint her but sanding her down would be a pain and I really don't want to break her, I may try once I'm a little braver.

And the modelling begins...

I set up some planes of my character, the side view and front view to help me in getting the right positioning for my character. I started the main torso first, I decided early on I would model separate bits and stitch them together to help me model better and faster.

I made the body out of a cube and extruded it along and down to make the arm, torso and legs. The head I considered making out of  a cube but it proved far too difficult so I made it out of a plane. This is my first time modelling a human character so I looked up a few tutorials online to help me and I found a very good one on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xls25e08sSg

The head began to take shape nicely. I added hair, which was another separate plane, I kept most bits separate for now so that if it needed changing it was easy to do so and I didn't have to worry about moving parts I didn't want too.

Once she took shape, I worked a lot in smooth mode so that I could see what she would look like finished, going back and forth between smoothed and unsmoothed so I could change vertices if needed.

This was when she was very close to completion. I had stitched her head, hands and feet to the main body, the tail, skirt and eyes I left separate.  Once I had mirrored the geometry I would combine all the meshes to make one model. I tweaked her now and then until I was happy.

And this is the finished, untextured model. I'm really happy with how she turned out. This is the first time I've ever made a character in Maya, and I'm rather proud, I can see some imperfections here and there, but for my very first try I'm happy with the out come. I had to change her design a little. I was getting very close to the poly count limit and I was worried that I would go over so I decided against giving her a hood, for fear of going over the limit and to leave some polys free if I needed to alter her in anyway.

About half way through modelling I changed her hand. the hand on the left was my first attempt and in my opinion it was very poor, I really didn't like it, so I decided to try it again.

Originally I did a quick extrude from a cube to make the hand on the left. but it looked really poor and I couldn't alter it much so I went looking for information to properly model a hand.

I found another tutorial by the same person who did the face modelling earlier on in this post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1mExXURsWk

I found that tutorial the most helpful out of the ones I watched. and the hand on the right is the end result and is MUCH better than before, it looks more realistic and has more definition.

For my 3D print I had to decide what I wanted to print, originally I was going to print all of her out but after asking some friends for their opinions we thought it was best to not print her all out, she has very skinny arms and legs and probably wouldn't have survived the printing.

So seeing as she has no accessories it was best to do a bust of her. The image above is the model I made for printing, it took me AGES to stitch her together, her head was made from 3 separate parts so I had to painstakingly stitch her hair and eyes to her head so that there were no holes. That was a long night followed by a lot of wrist cramping :(