January 07 - Storyboards, Animatic Draft 1, Character Design, preliminary modeling

February 07- Dog's UV Layout, Joint Controls, Backpack Unzipping, Schedule, FK/IK Controls, Fur Test 1

3-25-07

3-17-07

I've been re-rendering "Lost Ball" for the animation showcase, so that will be up soon. I took Jessica and James from Poser 1 (creepy, creepy program), and retextured their clothes:

And they're both jointed and weighted. Poser exported them with thier arms down, which was horrible in every way.

I made the purse the Yorkie will be in:

The color and the bump map are created from a photo of real leather. I couldn't figure out a way to duplicate geometry along a curve, (there was one post talking about attaching it to a motion path, but the stitch kept twisting around the path) so each of the stitches are placed by hand :(.

I've built a check-out counter, pictures to follow.

3-5-07

I originally created the blendshapes by re-importing the Yorkie every time, so I could use the joints I had created. When I then turned the geometry into a blendshape, the original would move over to wherever the blendshape was located, and take on the blendshape's pose. This was eventually fixed by unbinding the blendshape (deleteing the history) then rearranging the inputs for the original geometry, so the skin cluster came before the blendshape.

What I was supposed to do, of course, is duplicate the geometry off the original. I was using lattices to deform the geometry, but eventually those stopped working too. I had to do the blendshapes in two groups, the imported and the duplicated, with the imported input coming after the skincluster, and the duplicated coming before it. I had to center, by eye, in wireframe mode, each one of the duplicated blendshapes on the original. (Normally I wouldn't have to do this, but by this time the file was so messed up . . .) I want to talk to the blendshape god.

The Chihuahua's blenshapes are fine because I duplicated all of them. I hooked up the dogs to these controls:

I had to do a little but of weight painting because of the crazy formation. I cannot manage, however, to reach the second group of blendshapes in the Yorkie to paint them. This creates some double transformation with the eyelids, some of which can be fixed with the eyelid controls. But the Yorkie can't smile with her eyes closed, which will just have to be avoided. Though I haven't talked to my teacher yet.

The following .mov's are of the blenshapes at strength 1, I've overdriven them since.

These are the Chihuahua's blendshapes, click to play:

Play

And The Yorkie's, click to play:

Play