Week 14

Though a bit jealous at the lucky few spending their time at the Pictoplasma festival It's been a good week.

A lot of work done this week. Mostly for some freelance stuff but a good deal knight as well.

Rig is up and working like it should. Gone over all finger to give them a bit more movement to. Also simplified the expresso a bit since I have so few joints in my rigs hands.

The UV mapping is FINALY done. It took some  and and a whole lot of testing to figure out a good way to work with it. But I think I got some grasp of how to get a working UV. Have done a lot texture tests to get a deeper grip of the material maker and how to get certain effects to look good. I have found a lot of good methods to use with the UV map.

Material tests

Another problem I'm glad I took some time to fix was my hands build. I think my erlier rig would have given me a lot of trouble when being animated. I made so many changes while in subdivided mode that the base mesh looked very unreliable. I tweeked the thing to look a bit cleaner and made some extra cuts for better deformation.

Before

After

 I think this new mesh will make the skinning a lot easier.

Another problem I have been looking into is my feather. This turned out to be more difficult then expected. Not to get it to look the way I want but to move the way I want. The spline physics are a lot harder to work with then I thought since the anchor points don't react to each others rotation. This will make the feather deform around its own axis in certain movements. My hope is to be able to make the feather move through dynamic bones. So far unsuccessfully. Also tried letting dynamic bones deform a FFD that held a spline but that didn't work either.

The other dynamic element in my animation, the cape, is a lot easier. By simply belting the cloth to the knight and adjusting the properties I think it will look al right.

I've also researched a lot of camera mapping to be able to set up my scene in a good way. The Projection Man part of Cinema 4D seems to be a great tool and I'm looking forward to trying it out on my scene.

I saw Rango some week ago and got very inspired by the character design in that movie. Their super realistic and over the top design worked very well and gave the movie a very unique style. I got inspired to take my own designs a bit further since I often play it safe when it comes to styles. I must try to be more bold in my designs.

Got another inspiring movie experience. Although not a animation it did well what I think I have to work on. I saw True Grit and loved the way the characters interacted with each other. This is something that all the Coen films do well. Phenomenal tension between them and interesting characters. In animation its easy to focus on the style and motion. In best senarios even the story. But character interaction is something that doesn't get enough attention. I would love to try to involve that more in future projects. 

For finalizing the Knight animation I look around at a lot of different animations. Since I can work on my texture now I've kept an eye on the Meet Buck animation and French Roast. Both work in a excellent way with textures and also use matte paintings in a great way. Camera mapping matte paintings to get detailed environments quick.