animation test for glukoza production

OverKings animations

Here are the cycles I made for the Overkings online game back in april. Was a fun experience. I made between one to two of these per day as a rule, but some animations like a manticore run cycle took about 2 days, probably because it was my first time animating a quadruped. I did learn a few things though.

Studying maya rigging

Just so you know guys, I haven't been slacking, but this rigging stuff is really frying my brain. So far I've finished 2 tutorials on this little blue dude by Digital Tutors, but there's a lot more to learn before I feel like I know enough to rig my model. I'll try to keep the updates coming

Sorry about the delay

more updates coming, currently busy with some game animation

skin shader settings

Well, this isn't the best setup, I might still need to finish a couple specularity and bump maps (for example for hands and fingernails), but here's the skin shader settings in case anyone's interested. I have a separate material for the legs, because I couldn't fit them effectively in the same texture space

Turntable Animation!!!!

Here it is! Although youtube kinda killed the quality quite a bit, but oh well. So, I was only able to render this out after I installed windows 7 64 bit and got 4 more gigs of RAM, just like i predicted. And dealing with hair shadows was a pain too. Either way, here's the turntable render. Hope you guys like it, I know i do. Next step - rigging! Who's excited?



Here's a sample of what the original video looks like

And here's a face closeup with slightly reworked materials

Updates are coming soon in case anyone's reading this! Still improving my hardware

Rendering troubles

My computer just won't render this. The hair just makes mental ray and maya endlessly crash. This pic was actually rendered outside maya, apparently if you right click the scene file, there's a "render" oprion there - whoa! I tried installing mental ray standalone, but i'm not good with stuff that has no user interface O_O. So within a few days I'm gonna need to install a 64 bit windows 7 and buy like another 4 gigs of RAM, I think that ought to take care of the issues.

Almost there

Ok the styling's almost there. I'm having MAJOR troubles rendering this though. Also i don't like the fact that you can't see hair in reflections and through transparent objects, and i'm not happy about the tips of the pigtails, but i'm not sure how to make those strands nice and pointy.
Well, either way, now i have to touch up some minor things, deal with mental ray endlessly crashing, finish the skin shader and some other materials, set up a nice render and i think we're almost ready for rigging.

More hair work

Well, this will become the final hair style when i'm done styling it, and also i gotta dig deep into mental ray memory distribution settings, since the damn thing just keeps endlessly crashing and won't let me increase the hair passes or hair render quality.

First Shave and a Haircut hair test

Ok this is my first hair test using JoeAlter Shave and a Haircut. This is NOT the final design, I'm actually going for the blonde pigtails, but for now I'm happy that I got the damn thing to render AT ALL, it's super-crashy, the hair renders one time and the next time it doesn't, nightmare! I think I might have discovered a very delicate balance of settings that doesn't make Maya ignore the hair geometry, freeze of crash with a fatal error. Next step - see if I can style the damn thing.

Clothes

Mostly done with the clothes, well, I guess there's still some texture work left, but then again, noone will notice, so i just might leave it like this. Let's see, what do i have here: well, there's an Ncloth skirt that I modeled from a poly plane, then converted to SubD then NURBS and then back to poly and that way got some UV coordinates for free from NURBS. Yup, learned that technique from one of the Gnomon UV mapping tutorials. The Ncloth seems to be deforming fine, but i guess i'll only really know once the model's rigged and animated. The shirt and the suspenders were originally poly, then converted to Ncloth, simulated and then back to poly. I don't think i'm really gonna need dynamic simulations there because the Tshirt is skin tight and the suspenders are just sitting on top of it, and Ncloth is just waaaaaay slow, so i have to find ways around it if i can. Oh and i made some point to surface constraints over where the buttons on the suspenders are to make the T-shirt deform around them and not through them. Of course i had to tweak some vertices after i converted it all back to poly, since some things were still going through other things a bit. Bla bla bla, i'm such a geek.

The point is, i think it's almost time for hair!!!!

This is my first lame Ncloth test. Lame because i'm not really done modeling this shirt all the way, but I just wanted to see what it might look like. How do you like the Hello Kitty print? Ha!

Blocked out the skirt. Will probably need a more powerful comp for the shirt though as I believe I'm gonna need some folds there which I'm not looking forward to modeling, so it has to be some kinda simulation.

Shoes again

Well this is not much of an update, I've mostly been fighting with my computer to get it to render anythign at all, apparently anything larger than 600x600 pixes makes mental ray crash. Let's see, i've cut holes for the shoelaces (so not worth it, should have used an opacity map instead), made a specularity map for the shoes so now only the rubber parts are shiny and the bump and duffuse map for the shoelaces that you can barely see at all! see how good i am with time and effort management

bump map progress

Ok so I'm mostly done with the crazy bump map from hell. Now I kinda wish I'd made holes for the shoelaces, but I didn't think I'd go into this detail

test

Here's a quick test render, I just couldn't resist. Obviously there's a lot of work on the textures and materials for the chucks left

Mapped the shoe. Dare I say it was more difficult than mapping the body, because not only you have to avoid stretching, but also figure out how to make the map flow nicely along the edges of the shoe.

Eyebrows!

I'm pretty happy with the way the eyebrows turned out. The eyelashes still might need tweaking as it's just planes with transparency maps and i need to make them slightgly more irregular

Trying to figure out the eyelashes. Using transparency map for now, not sure if I like it

Started working on the eyes today. A bit creepy for now, but it'll get there. I hope :D

I'm currently working on the textures for this model. I mapped it in UVLayout, it's a very neat piece of software, really easy to use! The diffuse map is almost finished, i still have to paint over the texture seams and refine some details, then i'll move on to drawing the specular and bump maps. I'm using mental ray fast skin material, and I think it's working pretty damn well, although i'm not quite done setting it up yet.



here's some arm and hand detail so far. Still a bit much sub surface scattering ont he fingers i guess







aaaand a legs closeup!

Girl model

This is the model I'm currently working on. I intend to rig this one as well as create dynamic clothes and hair for it and eventually animate it. This model was created using Maya.