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Pointy’s rig is finished! (Ish.)

A timelapse for the modelling process and part of the rigging process for Pointy from my forthcoming cartoon “A moment in the sun”. The video is unedited, complete with questionable decisions and short pauses when I get stuck – and this time there’s some narration.

This character’s only ever meant to be seen side-on, hence the weird geometry.

In this video you can catch a glimpse of:

  • rigging curves using hooks parented to bones 0:53
  • making custom bone shapes (“rig handles”) 5:50
  • tidying up the rig by locking unneeded controls 7:48
  • the hackiest IK foot setup in the universe 11:10
  • fixing a reverse finger curl 18:05
  • setting up lattice deformation 20:31

Made in Blender 2.71 release build. (Not using any specific new features though.)

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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It’s Sunday. Here’s what I did this week.

On Monday, Tuesday and Saturday I wrote drafts of a project I’m kicking around quietly. It’s proving a real bitch to get the tone right, so It may be a non-starter.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I began making Pointy from “A moment in the sun”. (He’s a bit peeved because I haven’t worked on him since Wednesday.)

On Thursday I worked on the bear nose morph test for the quiet project and posted a timelapse of it afterwards.

On Friday and Saturday I wrote a bit of music for fun – nothing worth showing off. The timelapses would definitely go better with music and narration, and thanks to VirtualDub it’s possible to add an audio track to a silent video without having to recompress the video. Useful!

The weekend has mainly been catching up on movies. I watched Barbarella, La Dolce Vita and The Godfather, Part III. Barbarella was very late sixties cute and silly; I enjoyed the memory of La Dolce Vita more than the experience of watching it because it went on for so bloody long; and Godfather III was.. well.. Sofia Coppola can direct better than she can act, that’s for sure.

I suspect La Dolce Vita’s going to need some time to digest. I liked 8 ½ and Fellini Satyricon better, though the image of a giant Jesus statue being flown across the city by helicopter is a great way to open a film.

HEY KIDS! HERE COMES HELICOPTER JESUS!

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Good news, everyone! Blender 2.71 Release Candidate with its sexy splash screen is now available! Quite possibly by the time you read this, the final version will be out, and quite possibly other versions besides.

And now for another video – still a build timelapse, but for a short proof of concept test for a surreal/absurdist project I want to do after “A moment in the sun”. It involves a metamorphosis. I wanted to be able to morph not just the mesh but also the textures and materials. This is a timelapse of a quick “first draft” attempt and shouldn’t be considered in any way authoritative about anything.

In this video, you can watch me:

  • modelling a cartoon bear’s snout based off reference art
  • repositioning the snout’s vertices to turn it into a human face
  • setting up driven shape keys to go between the two
  • altering the driver’s curves to give more character to the morph
  • setting up an armature for character animation
  • unwrapping the mesh and getting it ready for texturing
  • painting three different materials using Texture Paint 
  • failing to save one of the textures and having to paint it again >:|
  • fading between the different materials dynamically using drivers

Done in Blender 2.71 test version.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)