Nude Caruso

Using the reference images made by Nell, I modelled the rest of Caruso's body. There were talks of a scene where Caruso will be depicted in a semi-nude state when he is placed in a machine that takes him to the Rift World. However, that has yet to be confirmed (and may not be feasible in the given time) but it is still a good foundation to start modelling a clothed version of the character and a great chance for me to focus on human anatomy. 

This is an almost complete version but I can already see areas that may cause potential problems when animating (notably the knees) - I hope there won't be too many unexpected deformation surprises! I roughly applied a TSM2 rig to test out how the body deforms and surely enough, the knees did need some alterations but everything else seemed to work just fine. 

Back to finishing up the model though, I had some trouble closing up the neck area. I modelled the head and body as separate meshes in individual scenes and imported them into the same scene to combine and merge them. As expected, there were far more edges on the head that needed to be joined to the body so I spent a while trying to reduce the amount of edges on the head mesh and have ended up with a large gap at the front of the neck.

It is a little frustrating when I'm already falling behind schedule and it's uncertain whether nude Caruse will even feature in the final product...

Motion Capture Session

To help things along we have decided to use motion-capture technology to create our character animations in Knightside Chronicles. I personally am an advocate for hand-keyed animation but I am still very excited to be using motion capture data since I have never worked with it before. Hopefully the recordings will be able to provide good key-positions for the cleanup process and save us some time. Kingston University has a motion capture system by Animazoo and it seemed a shame not to take advantage of it while we are studying here.

Need to learn how to use the data now...

Model Progress Update

Unfortunately I wasn't very happy with the first version of Caruso's head so have decided to re-make the head mesh from the very beginning. This time, I started with the "Create Polygon" Tool to create smaller planes and extrude the edges to form the face. I felt it was much easier to  control the edgeflow using this technique and it matches the reference images far better. Though it was slightly more time-consuming, I am much happier with the end result:

After a little more refining:

I encountered a few problems when modelling the ear - what I did was model it as a separate mesh then combined and merged it with the head but due to the restrictions placed by how many edges were left for the ear to attach to I was unable to create an ear I was completely satisfied with. The final ear was adequate for the job but I couldn't work out a way to incorporate more detail -luckily I have Mudbox to sort that out (hopefully!) and at least for the most part of the game, Caruso will be masked and his ears hidden.

Character Modelling

Although I focussed on character modelling for my previous "Modelling and Texturing" module assignment, it  is still a task I approach with a slight sense of dread as I am still very inexperienced when it comes to 3D humans. Not only does the character need to look "right" the mesh also needs to be able to deform well when animated and especially when the character is to be modelled for a game - the poly count needs to be efficient!

Taking the reference created by my team-mate Nell, I set out to start modelling Caruso's head for the Knightside Chronicles project.

I first created a polygon plane and used a combination of the "Interactive Split Tool" and "Insert Edge Loop Tool" to form the face but I'm feeling very "trapped" using this method and am not overly pleased with how the face looks here.

Storyboarding

Our team leader for Knightside Chronicles - Cullan -  typed up a rough script of the intended cinematic cut-scene that will occur right before the player enters the playable part of the game. During this scene, the player will be introduced to the game's playable environments. For the last couple of weeks, I have been working to create a storyboard to enable us to visualise the cut scene based on this script.

 

Six pages of storyboards later and I have only covered about one page of the text (out of 6 pages). This has been a fun exercise though, and it's good to utilise some of the animation-film-making skills that I developed during my undergrad  in animation. Depicted above is the moment when Caruso awakens in the "Rift World" and discovers some weapons.

Knightside Chronicles

I little something I've been working on for my final project at uni: Knightside Chronicles 

This is one of the proposed in-game enemies called a "Ravager" - it was a good chance for me to model something that is more robotic and mechanical :)

Animating...

Animating...and procrastinating...and slowly turning into a caveman...yes, MAN.

More complete scene 1...

With the added background colour I made from dye and oil pastels, the character walk cycle refined and the cloud drawings replaced with sumi-e brush clouds I think this result looks pretty good! The detail of everything seems to make the grass, which the character is walking on, stand out...and that's standing out in a bad way!



Unfortunately time is running very low in supply for me so I'll have to prioritise more animation before going back to this scene and re-drawing the grass! I'm about a quarter of the way with my rough animation - it's a tough job but I signed up to do it :)

Yay...3 weeks left?

Scratch animation test

So I'm still kinda unsure about my animation methods which is quite frustrating...I have in my head the idea that I will work efficiently by first animating roughly in Toon Boom, exporting all the images, tracing over the images with the custom sumi-e brush in Corel Painter, then compositing all the finished elements into Toon Boom Studio or After Effects...

That sounds like a lot more work than it seemed in my head ;_; I think I'll run out of time but if worse comes to worse I'll just polish up the animation drawings directly in Toon Boom Studio. The line work in the film "Le Papillon" looks like brush lines but at the same time it looks so clean and crisp rather like vector animation. I should able to experiment with the pressure sensitivity of my tablet and the vector brushes to create a similar brush line to "Le papillon" but it will not look as organic as the Painter brush.

For now, here's the first scene of the film animated in rough - there's slow panning clouds, wind-swept leaves in the foreground and a walk cycle. It looks a bit sparse at the moment (since it's so incomplete) but hopefully after a bit of work here and there it'll begin to take shape properly :)



I may or may not stretch out this scene so that the title appears at the beginning in the clouds...

Final Storyboard

Finally completed the storyboard and I am a lot happier with it :)

Though, I have just realised the entire film is now set outdoors so there is no need to use the different colour backgrounds. Oh well, the blue colour was my favourite anyway! Now to animate - I will animate everything in rough in Toon Boom Studio first and then I'll export the images and trace over them in Painter. I'm not sure I'll have the time for this but hopefully things will work out in the end...