Final Animation: Playblast Preview

   A preview animation is underway. For now here is a screenshot of what has been developed so far.

Deadline Approaching: Wednesday Progress

  Today has proven very productive one as there has been plenty of finishing up keeping me busy. The group has just about everything to progress with a cohesive animation.

   The coral is finished. The skeleton within allows for the coral branches to be posed, which will be useful when the coral is needed to pursue and surround our fish characters. As well as room to give some perception of variance when lots of these are used.

  There was a little refinement to do with the skin weights as there was a sizable spread especially further up. This was cleaned up rather promptly as the coral has plenty of large, uniform surfaces.

  The stage after this was to set up a control network to position the coral branches, which took some experimentation to strike the right balance between amount of control and number of control nodes to use.

  Each control unit controls between three and five joints each. Where there was a split, the joints were labelled "-A and -B" in the channel box.

  It was high time that the scales had their own texture maps. A workable texture was created, kept small for rendering purposes, and a blinn shader that included a reddish specular light and an ambient occlusion node for effect.

  With many of our assets completed I looked into a few of the models I had contributed for and looked into creating occlusion sets for them. This helps give an idea of these models in their purest form with only a basic shader and a good sense of depth.

Narrative - Fish Scales

After receiving the file from mark, I implemented the scales onto the fish character I had skinned. Working with the scales as they grow/shrink for the animation will be somewhat slow as each scale will have to be altered individually . It is quite quick work to alter each scale though so it shouldn't be too bad. I think this fish is looking really good so far and I look forward to seeing it textured.

 

Maya assets: boulders

Narrative - Skinned Fish Character

After many issues and restarts, the fish character is now completely skinned and setup with the basic controls. If necessary, I may add more controls for the fins and tail. Overall, I am very happy with the outcome here.

 

Character Setup 

Character Setup (moved joints and mouth control)

Narrative - Fish Skinning Progress

The fish character is steadily progressing and the skinning is working out so far. The basic movement of the mouth and tail have been done but small tweaks and cleanups will likely need to be made.

 

Fish Mouth Movement

 

Fish Tail Movement

Narrative - Rigging the Fish Character

 Basic Rig Setup

 Applied to Model

 Adding more Joints for Flexibility

Final Rig Setup

The Primary Hazard

  The development of the scales generated enthusiasm. The task today was making the coral/organism that would chase after our fish. Originally the plan was to use coral, but there were a few scenes that involved the coral reaching out. Doing some research there was some similarity to the tendrils of sea anemones. Which are a lot more flexible.

  First tests however resulted in a few errors from the way the joints were placed down. These took some time to rectify and were a little annoying.

  Initial attempts at a cleaner model involved joints at every lateral edge, but I discarded this as a control group would have 30 different joints to manage.

  To cut down the number of joints, instead of one joint per lateral edge I looked into one joint for every two lateral edges, which halved the original number.

  Each joint has three controls: X, Y and Twist. One bends the joint forwards, another sideways and the twist helps with curling. It is very flexible with little deformation. Hopefully it is simple enough to be used en masse. And it should also be useful for wrapping around things.

  The final parameter I added was a length control. Unlike the others, this one control affects the entire skeleton, which could really help with any scenes of the construct launching itself at our hapless fish. 

  The coral wasn't entirely forgotten about. I have developed a fairly sound method of reproducing the branches of a tree, which are very similar to branched coral. The plan is to work in a blendshape that will have the coral branches growing from their individual points of origin. 

Testing the Alien Scales

   My primary task this afternoon was to get a working system for having a set of alien scales grow from the body of Ravine's main fish characters. To do this it was suggested to use blend-shapes, which I spent the afternoon working on in order to get the transformation right.

  The core idea was to create a layer that would go within the skin. This layer would fit to the body by being wrapped around using a lattice deformer. A rough shape for the fish's body was used in palce of them odel itself for the time being. The final setup would need more precise positioning as the scales would grow from around the eyes and sweep towards the tail as they spread.

   Because blendshapes were used, the 'duplicate special' tool was used. particularly useful when duplicating large grousp of objects.

  To give the progression a natural feel the scales should ideally look like they're growing independantly. This was achieved by giving variance as to when they would start and how quickly they would stop growing.

 This is the UV map of the scale. Structurally it appears simple but detailed enough. Woudl lower-polygon versions be useful? Perhaps on more distant shots

Maya assets

Completed