urubutsin finished character

Finally have completed the urubutsin character which is also fully rigged, skinned and ready for animating. There are still some minor issues with it such as the wrist orientation on the rig being off but nothing that should majorly effect the animation.

urubutsin body and retop

I have finished creating the body mesh for urubutsin in mudbox, and retopologised the body and head.



 This is the finished base model for urubutsin in mudbox, he is missing a number of assets (hat,cane. etc) but i will be creating them at a later time.

This is the retopologised model in maya using a lot less polygons however in this image the normals applied to the head mesh had done something odd. The normals were facing the correct way and the head looked good in the high quality render viewport but when rendered they looked reversered. I attempted to invert the normals, edit the green in the normal map itself and still had the same issue no matter what i tried. Below is a closer render of the head.

Eventually i discovered it was the way that i had created the head that caused the issue. I had created it by retopolgising half the head and baking half the high poly head textures and normals onto it, then mirroring the mesh and attaching the two halfs of the head. So to fix the issue i simply unwrapped the head when it was a whole and re-baked the entire head texture onto it and the normals are now the correct way and it looks much better.

I have also added a seperate shader for the eyepeice in this render.

Crit week 2

I had my semester 2 crit week presentation recently and i did recieve a lot of useful feedback however most of the feedback was to try and discuss my theory for the project more in the presentation rather than the practical work and that the purpose of the year is more to educate others on what i have discovered rather than simply displaying finished work. I also recieved some minor feedback on the temple model being too tall and too wide for the time period and also about the timing on the 3d animatic.

Personally i do believe the presentation could have gone better i agree that i definately should have shown more of the theory in the presentation  and overall i believe i need to generally improve on my presentation skills.

3d animatic

As mentioned previously here is the 3d animatic for the final animation. It is definately an improvement from the previous animatic however it is still slightly too quick in places.

One issue that i did notice while creating this animatic was simply that given the fact that the animation will be done with the brothers being motion captured and Urubutsin being rotoscoped is that trying to identify how long scenes will take is conciderably more difficult than if the entire peice was created using key-framed methods.

Urubutsin character head

I have created the head for the character urubutsin in the final animation using mudbox Im not overly experienced with it having previously only done quick tests and general messing about with it in the past however i am fairly pleased with the finished head.

This was actually my 2nd model of the head as my laptop crashed soon after finishing the model the first time and the file was unfotunately lost.

Here is a render of the model after a bit more detail had been added and also painting the textures onto the model. This was actually again my first attempt at texturing in mudbox aswell and again I am pleased with the quality the of the finished head.
However there are a few issues one being the loss of detail the closer to the tip of the mask this was simply due to the fact that the model began as a mudbox basic head and I edited it to this shape and because of that the topology caused there to be a lot more divisions at the base of the head than the tip. The second issue is the polygon count which i will need to reduce through retopologising the model and baking the textures to make it suitable for animation.

final animation brothers base

I now that i have an idea of how i want the story to pan out i have edited the morpheus rig to have a starting point for the brothers.

Iae is on the left and Kuat is on the right. Their design was origionally going to be based on existing perceptions of god's of the sun and moon however after some research I could not find any that were consistant apart from the Egyption gods Throth and Ra who's design doesn't really fit into the story. so given that the story's antagonist Urubutsin was a vulture god I instead looked at animals relating to the sun and moon and decided that a lion for the sun and panther for the moon seemed appropriate.

With this in mind i created these quick edits of the morpheus rig to give myself a base to work from, of course the hair, clothing and textures will be edited in future to make them more period appropriate.

storyboard animatic

For the creation of the animation i have storyboarded and created an animatic with an attempt to get a vauge idea of what the pacing of the animation will be. Unfortunately it is far too quick cut and many of the camera angles could be made more interesting, and after a meeting with my project supervisor we both agreed that creating a 3d animatic would be better to create more interesting camera angles in a blocked out environment and also help the planning with correct timing.

temple creation for final animation

In the final animation most of the animation will be based within a temple to astral deities. so looking I began to look at gothic church's that fit into the time period in an attempt to imitate the architecture  from that time.

Here is some of my current progress renders of the temple i do have appropriate tileable textures ready to apply however i am wanting to add more detail to the model first if i have the time to do so.

Pitch week 2

Had my semester 2 pitch week presentation a couple of weeks ago, after presenting my work and concept for the final animation I got one resounding peice of feedback which is that the pitch seemed as if it was focusing more on the technology than the performance on the animation. Was also advised to change the structure of my project aim to place character performance first.

Given the feedback i have restructured the aim of the project and am planning on focusing more on the performance in the final animation regardless of the capture or rotoscope.