#exploratory 3d

Model is basically complete and ready for its rig!

I have also been testing different textures and looks, as well as practicing with the skeleton and auto rig features of Maya. Perhaps time wise I will need to auto rig for a quadruped and then edit the skeleton and rig through that as time is becoming short. Even if I run out of time to animate it, I will have the rig done on time.

Mostly all technical jargon from there. I continue to reference my different articles and videos on quadruped rigs, though I wish there was more information on Kung Fu Panda character rigs as thus far they seem like very well made and efficient Quad/Bi pedal rigs that I would love to learn more about.

I have remade my plan and the timeline of work to now be focusing of a modelled, rigged, and animated quadruped. We have only ever modelled and rigged bipedal characters, and have done only one beginner walk cycle (which I was not very proud of). I think it would be extremely beneficial to apply myself to this so I can show off better technical rigging, and have a quadrupedal model that I can animate and use however I wish. This will be based on a bi pedal model I have thus far. It is a eastern style dragon and I have a current model as a bipedal character, which will not work for a short film I am working on, nor to practice quadrupedal rigging. Thus I shall re model it to better rig it. Current bipedal character:

And the new concept model sheet:

I also have a rough rigging planned on top of this to demonstrate how I will begin the skeleton. I am referencing works such as Kung Fu Panda for rigging and animating, as their characters such as Tigress and Viper have very unique rigging techniques. I also will reference Disney's Mulan for the dragon character Mushu's animated actions and movements, as I find it difficult to find life references of dragons. The following are some very interesting articles on different such rigging techniques.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.474.9719&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://gsanitech.blogspot.com/2011/05/animation-talk-with-kung-fu-panda.html

I have hit a lot of walls in my progress. I have watched through tutorials for after effects but unfortunately I have come to the conclusion that after effects feels more 2D then 3D. A lot of the tutorials required videos finished that the effects were added on top of. I was going about solving this by potentially rendering things in Blender first; but I have no knowledge of the software and would have to restart the learning from scratch, which is costing time I do not have. I have added a bit more to the rough scene. I have smoothed it out, added more stone details, and combined certain elements to make the mesh easier to manipulate. Unfortunately I hit a few different technical issues, but after trouble shooting and checking with classmates I found there was simply some settings hidden that really messed the mesh when moving it around. An updated shot is as follows:

Things still seem very confusing with classes being interrupted and schedule/due date changes, but this week I managed to get a rough out for the scene and a final concept art.

The concept art turned out very nice. Simple yet with good opportunities to really display what I am trying to with the particles and water and light. I also played with color palettes and this is definitely my favorite one.

I found the rough scene quite fun to work on actually, much easier then going straight into a high res build. I also found a bit of difficulty as my program seems to crash when I extrude to much, but I navigated it by using the insert edge loop tool more after extruding a section to about the right spot. I am still tweaking, and I may want to do a few more things, but I find it is looking really good and the next steps is adding things like the grass and then the water.

This week has been packed with assignments and due dates changing rapidly, thus I have not met my goals for this week. I found a few more tutorials and references, the best of which I will link below; but other then that the work balance has been very off and I hope things work out better next week.

First update on my study into animating particles/different element physics associated with them. Todays update is based on research done on what programs are available for this type of work and deciding which I will focusing on to use going forward.

For animation and modeling itself I will be using Autodesk Maya for a bulk of the work. I have been using it for two years now and feel I can be quicker and more accurate using this software. Some examples of past model work is below, as well as a hand made rig.

Through my schooling I have access to adobe features, and in my research I have found that Adobe After Effects and Blender both have many tutorials available online, and a lot of reference material on how to use it. Where other programs such as Houdini cost a small fortune and many others require buy ins of some sort to actually save any of your work, I believe these are the programs I will be using to practice and render my final work.

I have also found a small program that does not have much info on it but seems promising, called Boris FX, for particle illusions. I have yet to really try it out but I am hoping to see how it really works since the basic access is free. Though plugins once again must be bought and I believe I will once again go back to Adobe After Effects.