... 4hours later.

Trying to get the beard working better. Whatcha think.

It still needs work and has screwed up the model in a few small spots which i need to go back over and fix but want feedback before i do anything else.

Took about an hour of experimenting before i worked out a way of extruding the beard without mucking up the mesh, turned out be a similar process to what i used to get the holes in the belt.

As i said it still needs work but let me know if i'm on the right track.

And yes i've still got to fix his nose.

Are we done....? I think we may be done...

I think he's done! Just need the two thumbs up and i'll crack on and start his UVing.

Righty, lets get up to date.

With a significantly lighter bank account i can happily state that that my new computer is built and its INCREDIBLY powerful. So (even though its early days) rendering shouldn't be a problem.

On gnomes i've spent most of my time recently on modeling Macho, I was going to be modeling Hero as well but Yaniv has taken it off of my hands now so i can really focus on Macho.
There's been loads of tweaking done on him and i think he's nearing completion. I need to redo his collar using the extrude tool, sort out the edging around his face and do more to his belt and then i think that'll be it. Going to focus on my disertation tonight and then do more on Macho tommorow evening, get it checked by Sarah on fri and then hopefully start UVing him over the weekend.

Machos been modeled differently to how i would usually model a character, In the past i have had the main mesh made out of several different pieces but for this i was told to model all of the main body out of one shape. Its takes longer than it would usually to do it but the end result is much better.

A bit of a short post but i really have only spent my time on this model so i havnt got anything else to show.

Cuz it been a while.

Cuz it has been a while. Christmas has come and gone with the normal boring repetitive meetings of relatives and family friends who won't be seen for another year and after the dismal and anticlimactic event that is new years we're ready to start the new term. We had two meetings over the holidays one to meet our appointed sound design and show her what it i we're making and hopefully give her some ideas to go away and work with and the second as just a recap of work we had produced.

Firstly going to post this which is the final grass test that i did and kindof the one we're gonna go with.
Pretty much all thats been done is another tweak of the light colouring and adding the elements of longer grass and pebbles o break up the sharp edge of where the watering can meets the grass. There will be patches of brown mixed in with the green but where this is located is going to be entirely dependant upon the object placement within the scene file, so as soon as we start putting it together i'll get straight in there and make a start on that.

Right next I wanna talk briefly about the short animation "The Gruffalo" that was on over christmas, first of i thought he story was pretty weak the animation and rigging wasn't amazing and it was generally to cheery for me to like. But the environments were really incredible and i saw a good few pieces that i really liked the look of one scene in particular was incredibly similar to how i have been planning to have our piece look like. It involves a pan down from a mid height down tow at the mouses height, i'll upload pics of it as soon as i can find a working version of the film (all current versions I've found have been flawed)

Did some modelling of Macho over he holidays as well, I've got the general shape of him pretty much there. The body is fine and i dont really wanna change anything on it, I did have some arms and legs on him but then me with Sarah and she gifted me with two pairs of much better ones so i'll be using those. We alos had quite a long discussion over how the faces and limbs where going to work. We had a quick look at what they had done on the rigs for Studio AKA's Lost and Found. We noticed that instead of using a spline inside of the limbs they had placed the FKs outside of the rig of the arm and the use the painted weights and different values on the divisions. I did a quick test to show how i thought it worked and see whether we could replicate it. It didnt work brilliantly but it proved that it worked so i went home and spent some time doing a much better test.
So Yeh that works, the painting of the weights isnt at all subtle in this example but i can see any reason why we cant get this working on our final rigs. It'll be a damn site better than using a spline.

Also got a rough face model of Sarah that she had knocked up for Hero and i did a blend shape test using that. And i can confirm that it worked, so i decided to do a quick animation with the eye looking about and blinking. This worked perfectly and was looking really nice so i sent it through to render. It got about half way through rendering and the computer froze and wouldn't respond then it crashed and wouldn't power back up. Upon inspection it was discovered that my motherboard had pretty much melted...bugger.

Thankfully the hardrive is intact so i haven't lost any work. Decided i'm gonna spend a good few hundred making myself a really fast processing comp for when we start rendering.

Erm...what else....

A small change i made was to give the eye an eyeball. This gives a curve to the eye and will allow us nice reflectivity. Though i'm pretty certain that Sarah already had this in mind.

Right i think hats about it...l8rs.

More Tests

Right first things first, i had a play with the lighting. Was looking at the test i did the other day and its horribly sterile lighting, so i looked at some autumny stuff and coloured and toned down the lighting to give it a more autumn feel. Theres now orange, green and yellow lighting the scene and i had to add a faint blue because the blue of the watering can got washed out. I wanna make the scene a tiny bit more foggy in some places so that we get some light trails but I've got nowhere near enough stuff to see how thats gonna work yet. The picture above is the same image the only thing different is the lighting colours/levels.
Same as the pic above, just felt the need to shown it standing alone. Ive upped the bump a bit from the last test. (this is my favorite test)
Just trying to see what its gonna look like with patches of dirt on it. This is only a quick test and isnt really that good and to get it working well in this way is going to take alot of effort and make the floor possible too busy once all the other objects are placed in the scene. I can always do more tests like this if necessary.
This was just the dirt texture i got overlayed ontop of the prexisiting texture, which i thought looked quite interesting.
So i changed the colour of it to make it less yellow and more green. This still work and looks more rugged, but i think may draw too much attention to itself and stands out more than the watering can.

Thoughts Plz...

Grass

Had a play with the flat plane grass and just want some feedback on this test cause i quite like it. This isn't done with the velvet but by mixing the existing textures with a cloud overlay and then a diffusion cloud bump. The lighting is a tad too bright in the first example because i underestimated the power of the occlusion but see what you think.

Was this our final model for the watering can? cause if it was i'll start texturing it properly.
And the close up, this is about an 2 inchs from the plane and has no occlusion on it. Theres a graphic pen overlay which is causing some trouble on the lighter areas but this is only because the size of the texure isnt massive and can be easily fixed. Let me know what you think cuz i want to see if i can get some longer grass incorporated in some areas (in the background round the watering can).

Mr Messenger is Unwell

Hey guys, am REALLY sorry about missing the second pitch today. Spent most of my day crouched over the toilet trying to stop my stomach escaping through my mouth.

Got a brief text from Sarah saying it went well so nice one!!! Awaiting the more detailed report that will no doubt be turning up on Sarah's blog over the next couple of days. Now the preps pretty much there we can storm on with the production.

Again really sorry for missing the pitch.

Matt