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.

Coral Reacher Nearing Completion

  As on schedule, the coral has been assembled, staged and animated. I might look into rigging and perhaps a controls for animation purposes but at present this is the construction so far. There was talk of including a gradient on concept art and there may need to be a little of colour modification for the final model, the core animation however does appear solid.

  In terms of geometry this is not too complex a model when a single instance is around 1.8MB of data. That may multiply considerably when there are lots of these but as mentioned in an earlier post but work was put into minimising the geometry so that lots of these could be on screen at once.

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.