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.

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