Crow!

I have spent this week making the rig for the crow and fixing various problems i am having making the wings fold and move properly.

I have also rigged Johns Bob character for his appearance in the graveyard.

A dillema

This week has been a bit of a problem week for our group we have lost a member, Patrick who planned to help me with the rigging of the characters this week. At the begining of the week however we managed to find a first year animation student willing to help us out with some basic rigging and also some help rigging from Wan.
This week I have been working on the blend shapes for the character Bob who says hi to grim in the graveyard, he is the only charater in our film to talk properly. I have also been playing around with rigging so that I know what to do when i come to rigging this week. because this week has been so occupied with other problems i have fallen a bit behind with the schedual, i really wanted to start animating this week. so I will have to work really hard this week to make sure all the rigging is complete and the characters are ready for animation.

Textured the characters!

This week i have been texturing the remainder of my characters, I really enjoy painting the textures for my characters althought it can be a little time consuming, especially making the feather texture for my crow below. it was quite chalenge to make him look natural and acheive the look of feathers. i alpha chaneled the feathers to make it appear like i have modeled the individual feathers which i think has worked well. Hopefully when I add a rig in with the model I can close the wings properly. I am a bit dissapointed this week as i planned to get alot more of the blend shapes done for my characters this would have got me back on target with my schedual. Next week I plan to get most of the rigging done for my characters. Its not really enought time for me so i am rather worried.

Good progress..

Since last Thursday i have modeled the crow character. I found working out how to model the wings quite a challenge as i do not need the crow to have his wings fully open, just at his sides with the occasional ruffle so i will need to allow for a bit of movement in his wings. I have created lots of flat planes on the model as i plan to create the feathers using alpha channels so that all that can be seen on these planes is the feathers.


On Sunday i started to model the old man who has a heart attack. As we wanted all the old people in our film to look very similar i have taken a template of the old man john has modeled and given him some different accessorys and changed the shape of his face slightly such as giving him a chin.

Textures

I did a few tests today on the alpha channels which create the fur effects around the face, it was hard to get them to look like they belonged to the cat and not just strange bits of fluff stuck on.
i was also playing around with the bump map on the texture, i want to improve this if i get the time.

Getting back on track

we had a productive meeting on monday worked out all the possible tasks that we need to do to get the film finished and worked out how we could best used our time to get this done.
it is very clear that we may need to get some help from other people to actually stand a chance of completing the film.
we still have many outstanding tasks to complete such as texturing, rigging the characters and of course animating!


I have been working on texturing the cat for a few days now which has gone okay. i strugled to find a way of making the cats fur look like fur without the use of maya fur which is way too much for the needs of our film. this is what the texture for the cat looks like so far..

I am pleased with the colour he is i would just like to find a better way of making his fur look more textured and shiny fur. i have read up about creating more shaders to get this look i want although i havet got further than creating a bump map for him to give him a textured apperance.