I thought I might go ahead and keep everyone up to date with what I've been doing this winter break. At this point, I'm still working on skinning my astronaut. Maks Naporowski was nice enough to stop by today and help out with the character. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the process.
The reason why skinning is taking so long is that the rig itself is pretty complicated. This is because it is composed of 'stretchy' joints. Unlike a normal joint structure, stretchy joints mean that there are extra joints in between the normal ones (for example instead of just two joints, there would be an extra 5 joints added in between the elbow and wrist joints).
The advantage of this is that I can accomplish greater movement and 'stretchiness' with my character. The downside is that I have to go in and connect the skin to almost every one of these joints.
Anyways, I should be able to finish that before Christmas. I'll also be able to replace my character stand-ins with my actual characters and achieve some basic blocking by the end of this week. I'll then begin my animation after Christmas and have everything done by late January.
Here is a picture of what my large alien will look like. He will be the primary antagonist who will try to eat my small alien. I'll model him tomorrow and he should be good to go after that. The advantage is that he will only be on screen for a short while (15 seconds) and I won't require him to move much. Because of this, I won't have to spend time rigging him. I'll update my progress on him next week and upload some more pre-vis while I'm away for Christmas.
Woohoo! Can you believe that an entire semester has passed? One down, one more to go....our semester here at USC. I want to congratulate all of my classmates on their hard work so far. Everybody's films look incredble. Fireworks for everyone!
Celebration is short because I still need to do a ton of work. I've composed a list of what I have achieved so far and need to complete for winter break. In terms of my schedule, I am a little behind, but will be able to catch up and even more during the holidays.
MODELING:
Here's what I have for modeling. For my characters, I completed my astronaut and alien. I've finished the exterior and interior models for the spaceships. I still need to model my large alien and my space landscape.
For winter break, I will need to model my large alien and space landscape. My large alien will only take half a week to complete and rigging won't be an issue. This is because he will be in the film for only a short while (30 seconds) and will not be needed to move around a whole lot. I can achieve the desired amount of animation if I create a few simple blendshapes and physically twist his body when he bounces on the small alien.
The space landscape will take the least amount of time to complete. I've already created the ground layer and will just need to model a few more rocks to dot the surface. I will model the rocks in ZBrush and import them into Maya.
RIGGING:
Overall, rigging is 80% completed. I want to thank Lisa Anderson for the body rig and Ryan Chen for the the facial rigging/skinning. They did awesome, incredible work. Everything is working perfectly and I am so glad that I turned to them for help. I am really impressed with what I have and greatly appreciate all the time and effort they put into it. Thank you guys! Here is an lip sync test with the astronaut made by Ryan Chen:
The rigging is done, but I still need to complete the skinning. For those who don't know, skinning involves conforming the skin of the character to their skeleton. I was hoping to finish skinning him before the faculty review but due to the complexity of the skeleton itself and time conflict, I will finish it up by next week. Maks Naporowski is helping me along the way. Here is work in progress:
For my small alien, Sean Manning is planning on finishing him up this week. It is looking amazing so far and I'm am extremely confident in achieving the desired animation I need. I especially love his expressions. Take a look!
TEXTURING:
I realized that texturing won't be as important or as time consuming as I thought. The only real texturing I will need will be for my space landscape. The environment will be very rich in red and pinks. I will use a rock texture for the surface and the rocks. A matte painting will be used for the backdrop. A sample matte painting:
Some examples of the colors I will be using:
In contrast, the colors and texturing of the spaceship will be very sterile. Very little colors and more white throughout. These would help emphasize the hunger and lonliness of the astronaut onboard. It will be sort of reminiscent of the coloring used in this fantastic, yet very similar short:
RENDERING:
I've determined that all of the rendering will be done through mental ray. Using this software will take a bit longer to output out, but it will look much better compared to using the normal Maya software. Plus, the rendering will take less than expected time due to the render farm being made available to us starting next semester. IN SUMMARY:
So a list of what I need to accomplish this winter break:
Finish skinning for astronaut
Model large alien
Model and texture space landscape
Texture spaceship, astronaut, and small alien
Render test footage
Begin animation
I'll be here all break so I should have enough time to complete all of these.
To my classmates: Happy Holidays and good luck next semester!
It's been a while since I updated the blog with some pictures of my work in progress, but here we go. Here are a few pictures of the updated interior shot from my spaceship. Compared to my last update, I included more mechanical objects inside and updated the desk. A new steering wheel, keyboard, gearshift, and other features on the desk to help spruce it up a bit more.
Now if you remember, here is what the outside looks like. I haven't really changed it but I might tweak the engines a bit to make them more realistic. But this will be what the final model will pretty much look like.
