Month 12: Character Rigging 2/Professional Communication andPresentation-Online

Alright, an update is overdue. Things have been very busy as I jumped back onto my accelerated schedule. The few days I get off I usually spend catching up on home work.

So in January I took my second, and final rigging class as well as an online public speaking class. Yes... an online public speaking class.....

Ok so in Rigging 2  we had a very small class (only 6) which is pretty awesome for 1 on 1 time. We were gave a troll/ogre character that was modeled by our course director and we had to do several things with it.

First we had to select an already made motion capture file and attach it to the troll. A motion capture file is what is made when people dress up in those suits with all the balls all over that basically sends their movements to a computer. So we were essentially attaching that to the troll.

Then there were several clean up phases where we cleaned up the animation in places that things did not deform properly. Because the trolls body is not exactly like our motion capture data it would look a bit broken at first

Notice it in the ears, arm pit area, and under the belly.

So several days and hours later when it is more or less cleaned up we started doing some other things.

We added some rigging in the face so we can control different parts of the face. And I animated my shot camera to make the scene a bit more interesting.
In this video I left the controls on to give an idea what they look like.

 

So after this stage we did some dynamics trickery and gave a few pieces of the trolls body jiggle. We also added fur and a hair system to the troll.

With hair system and jiggle. The hair system has a few issues here so it looks kinda crazy.

Here is a rendered out frame to get an idea of what its looking like.

Before the mouth got textured.

So I did not get the time to render the whole shot, would have like to have posted that.

Overall it was a really cool class, even though I doubt ill be rigging much in the future.

I don't have any content to include for my online public speaking class. We basically did a couple speeches on our computers and timed them to a slideshow presentations. I did my final speech on how to live within your means as a student =)

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Because one of my classes was online I had some extra time and did some modeling stuff.
Here are a few projects I worked on for practice.

Bridge from Concept art

Never got to finishing this... classes started again. At this point I would rather work on other stuff.

Zombie creation

I used a bunch of zombie pictures I found on google and created this skeleton zombie guy.



OHHH also I almost forgot, my final project from MCR back in May was framed and hung up in the front of the 3d arts building along with 5 others. Very COOL! This was really cool because up to this point all they had put up on the walls was the work we do in our traditional art classes, it was really neat to see some 3d work.


So that's it, that was my January