Door Handle

Modelled a door handle for the shot where the farmer is struggling to open the door. (See Samirs blog for the animation). Here is a scene shot. NOT A RENDER!!!!!Still need to add bump map. Consists of 300 polygons.

Dont shoot me im not an animator!!!!!!

Here's my attempt at doing some animation for the intro where the farmer walks up to the barn. Its only the first pass and still needs a load of work to it so i might give it to Samir(Animator) to finish off. As there will be loads of animation in the film I intend to give the animators some help so i am trying to find my feet in animation again after a long hiatus from it.

Helping the Animators

I have been going over the controls i built for the rigs with the animators. Explaining certain functions and how to animator certain joints and use the fk/ik blend. Whilst doing to this we found certain things wrong with the farmers rig, this ended up being a good time to fully test the rig and highlighted any issues we may have when we come to proper animating. We found weighting was wrong in certain joints and deforming badly. We also discovered problems with the fk ik blend on the left arm. We the curve of the shoulder was moving the wrist and not the whole arm i was unable to parent constrain it to the shoulder for some reason and we was left in a dilemma as to what to do to animate the arm properly. We decided to delete the fk/ik blend completely and animate the joints individually. This would take longer to animate however there was no other obvious solution.

'Back Dated' Farmer Render

I forgot to post this a while back. I sent the farmer to Samir to do the weighting after he done that he done some test renders. I was pleased with how my textures came outon the character and baring in mind he is a very low res character he looks very good.

Im sure Samir will explain on his blog how he rendered them out but it looks like ambient occlusion with abit of subsurface scattering(SSS).

Intro Shot

I have been playing around with this intro shots where the truck is coming down the hill. I have added animation to the windmills and the tyres of the truck. Also i have played around with Reywells barn making it more prominent in the shotvand adding other assets such as Ians wall a gate, and some other bits and bobs

Veteran Chicken Update

To take a break from the main character i have been working on the veteren chicken. I created the basic model first then set about creating blendshapes the expressions we want. the character is only in the shot briefly(laying a ton of eggs rapidly) i realised the blendshape expression i was on working should just be the character expression all the time. Therefore we would only need a few blendshapes to create the breathing and the twitches in the face.

OH NO

I have made a grave mistake. I thought u binded before you started doing blendshapes however that doesn't seem to be the case. Its meant to be blendshapes then binding. OH WELL on the other hand after playing around with the blendshapes they are starting to come along nicely its harder to get expressions because of the beak. but i have persevered and here are some examples. smiling expression, 2 straining expression( still needs some work on those two), worried face, thinking look. Not all perfect i know but there getting there slowly i think.