Posing Iaven

Posing Iaven was pretty fun. The first pose is one I drew in his character pack, he is angry with his sister and is trying to stop her from getting in even more trouble. Second one looks a little strange but he is supposed to be pulling a carrot from the ground. Maybe I should pose his hands and feet a little better to make it look like he is actually pulling something. Third pose is him sitting down at a table - his hands were a little tricky, they were supposed to be just resting on his face but instead it kind of looks like he is crying? The last pose is him dabbing. No explanation needed.

These are some poses that I drew up in class today using a refrence picture from real life. The teacher wanted me to exaggerate the pose at the bottom so I did two versions of his torso rotating a bit to allow his left arm to be more visible in his silhouette.

Weighting Iaven

I've done the weighting of my character after a lot of pain because I decided to manually paint them on. I worked in black and white for this as I thought the colour map was too difficult to do.

The wrist and elbow still gives me a lot of trouble when I try to pose my character, the wrist is hard to twist properly and just looks a little broken - maybe I could try weighting the sleeves along with it.

The head and bow are seperate objects from the body, thus I had to cleanup the weights that connected them together for some reason. The whole head is one object that doesn't really have any independent parts that move other than the hairpiece so I just weighted the whole thing as one piece. The bow has 4 joints that move the top and bottom two pieces so that they are able to move and bounce around as I need them to.

Overall I think I've enjoyed weighting my character, and it is not as difficult as I remember it being which is good. There are some things that I need to fix but I can fix them as I pose my character further. 

Colour Controls and Grouping

I watched the videos and finished up the colouring of the controls,

Left = Red

Right = Blue

Middle = Yellow

Cog = White

Custom Controls = Green

Some things I did before this was do the locator in the knees. At first I did it but forgot to move it in object mode (even though the video told me to do it twice) so I had to redo it a second time. I'm confident that I did this pretty well and if I didn't, well I'll just redo it in the future (no biggie *cries*)

Another problem that I ran into was that the Clavical controls were hidden inside my characters geometry. I was confused when I tried to find and colour them but they weren't there. After hiding the geo I found them located very closely to the neck joint so I just moved them out so that they were more visible. 

The outliner reorganizing everything was kind of a nightmare. Not so much that it was hard but my eyes really started to hurt looking at everything grouped together strained my eyes a lot. I ended up finishing without a lot of problems though so I'm pretty happy about that. Next thing that I need to do is to join up the skeleton and do some weight painting. I remember when I was a little younger (maybe 4 years) I attempted weight painting with some premade models + animations. It was a mistake. Beause I edited the model the weights went way off and the only thing I could think of at the time was repainting them (with youtube tutorial help), so hopefully this time I am more successful than I was in the past (I wasn't).

The "old" model is the one that I tried to edit by removing the hat.

Controls pt.1

I have started the basics of my controls - doing each joint and trying to make this easier to reach, so by moving the finger controls to above the hand instead of around each joint, it will be easier for me to animate hand controls.

The second picture is from another day animating controls. I had forgotten what to put in the "Create Circle Ctrls" where JNT_ and CTRL_ are supposed to go. Instead I had stupidly put _L and _R which meant that when I created those controls the JNT was still there, and any _L that I had was replaced. I manually renamed everything but it was a pain to do.

This is pretty simple as it is and I feel as though circles and squares are enough for me. I personally don't like using very fancy shapes and I want to keep it clean and simple with cirlces for the arms and legs, and square shapes for the body.

For the tail I switched it up a bit and decided to use a sphere shape instead of just a simple circle. This allows me to quickly identify which control is the tail, and the shape is exactly the same as the tail itself.

The collar and neck I just moulded a shape that would fit around the head by moving the vertexes of a circle, These shapes are pretty distinct and wraps around the outside of the body to allow easier access.

Aligning

I've started aligning the skeleton, and it was pretty simple once I started getting into it. Some things that I had to change were the Clavical>Hands and Ankle>Toes. This was because I made a mistake and made everything have Y pointing upwards when this was not supposed to be the case. As shown above I fixed it so that Y was following the alignment of the skeleton.

After I finished with that I mirrored all the joints across. This part was simple as well, only using the mirror joint tool - I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Next I'll be going on to add the Controls. Watching the videos that Blake gives us really helps out because following him without it proved to be pretty difficult.

Rigging Iaven

Started to build up the skeleton for my character.

I started to rig the bow, but not sure how many to put in it - thinking two?

Background Concepts

My concepts for some backgrounds.

Because Iaven is a hybrid human/rabbit who's parents also own a florist shop I thought that a garden where his parents shops flowers are grown would be nice. There is also a strip for just growing carrots which he loves.

Other than that I thought some other cool backgrounds that I could use were an outside view of the town where the time stopping bubble can be seen - and the crash site of the alien (taking Hyemi's ship design).