Unit 65 Task 1

Looks like its going well Karl.

Looks a lot like your original design Karl, good work.

Make sure that the orientation of all your spine/neck/head bones are pointing the same way, y axis should be pointing backwards. Also you might need to choose different spine bones to the one I have chosen in the tutorial, this will depend upon how many bones you have in the spine and neck.

ITT: What happens when you import your model from 3ds max

Kizz (AW) wrote:

This is looking really good, Karl. However, I'm noticing that his head is a strange shape, though that may just be the way the camera is angled. You could import a picture of a head into the viewport of cinema so that you could make sure you've got it spot on. Keep up the good work, bro.

I stand by this comment.

Development Posts Redo.

So I started with a cube. After adding in subdivisions I began moving and tweaking the vertices to create the shape I wanted. Whenever I found I didn't have enough subdivisions I used the knife tool too create another edge loop.



Became

After working on the head I shaped the body using the same process as I used for the head.

After shaping the head and body I extruded the arms and legs of the model. He's finally starting to look like a human character. -ish

Next I began working on the hands. These too started out as cubes with a specific number of subdivisions that I could extrude out to create the fingers and thumb. I also matched the amount of edge loops on the back of the hand and the palm with those on the wrist so I could attach the hand to the rest of the arm.

Finally I began modelling the boots of the character. These also started out as cubes which I shaped into their current shape.

Now that the character was completely modeled I began working on creating the skeleton for this character.

After creating the bones that made up the characters skeleton I began weighting them to the mesh.

After weighting I began on the controls. Here are the controls for the hand.

Controls completed and ready to begin animation

Overall I feel the modelling of the character was pretty straight forward. It all came together and although it doesn't have the detail of the cowboy model I think the topology and simplistic design helped make the weighting and animating phase easier.

The boning process was pretty straight forward also. I ended up having to delete one of the bones in the foot in order to properly animate his feet hitting the floor but it was an easy fix.

Next came weighting. Weighting was extremely boring and tedious. However I feel the model was weighted fairly well. Some parts of the model could have been weighted better though. In particularly, his feet, knee and elbow areas. As the knees and elbows bends the back of the bend can deform strangely.

After weighting I began adding the controls. Controls are evil. I had problems mirroring the bone setup from 1 side to the other. Eventually this was fixed but I then had trouble with the knees bending the wrong way when I played the animation back in the Cinema 4d render window. Luckily a well placed root goal fixed this. Some people think I had a problem with the elbows on my model but it's just his bro walk. Honest.

Here is the sketch I did showing the front view of my character. Although it isn't very detailed (or good) it will help me when it comes to modeling this character in 3d. Important aspects such as the long coat, belt, boots and hat are all clearly shown so that I include them in my 3d model.

This is the side view sketch. By drawing a sketch showing the side view I am able to show any details that I might need to add to the model that I couldn't see from my sketch of the front view. This view will also help me see how thick the model should be when I begin creating it in 3d.

This is my sketch of the walk cycle. By sketching the characters movement and weight as the character begins his walk I hope to get a better understanding of how the character should look when animated in 3d. This sketch will also help me pose the character correctly during the walk cycle.