put some basic texture color + AO map. Also tightened the tri count to 3956 tris / 1980 poly.
what Iroh is supposed to look like :
the WIP so far.
Anyway this is fun, was relaxing doing the uv’s by hand, I normally just use Zbrush’s automatic layout, and I actually used it on the head, but for everything else it was hand laid out. Could have probably packed them tighter, Next time!
modeled up some fan art from Avatar the last airbender, Iroh the fire uncle of Zuko.
I enjoy his character because it’s similar to mine, Iroh is outwardly easy-going and friendly, and particularly fond of food, good tea and music. I was pleasently surprised how fast I whipped this one up, but also very happy with how the facial loops came out.
More updated with where I’m at with the club entry, slow going but I like the attitude I got on the hat dude, also think the change in speed of the “you not listening to me” on voice 1 was an improvement.
The more I’m animating these guys, the more respect I have for the guys at all the studios doing such amazing work, this stuff is hard. To do it right, eh…. it’s hard. More practice required for me. GOGO animate!
Here’s my progress on the competition, haven’t been animating as much as I wanted, but I’m going to stick to my promise and make sure that this goes all the way to being entered!
Started doing some stuff with the guy on the left, thought that maybe having his arms crossed the whole time was a bit boring, so now he’s more active and is irritated with this guy trying to tell him what’s what, but he’s also too soft to be rude so bares with it, and at the end gets caught off guard when the guy turns around to check if he is listening.
Any thoughts, comments and critiques are high encouraged.
Some reason the sound didn’t come through from youtube… sad.
A blog post!!! hard to be posting posts when you busy! Firstly I listened in on the free webinar by Josh Burton talking about facial rigging, he showed some neat things with the morpheus rig and the blendshape workflow and also some joint based sdk stuff for games, was really insightful and helpful. If you a maya user I highly recommend heading over to www.cgmonks.com and checking out what he and his monkey friends are doing.
As for me, I’ve sculpted and half rigged a BuckDog character, going to do some facial stuff for it next month, because my efforts right now are all going towards finishing this 11 second club entry.
I faded in November 2011 and didn’t submit, but this month I’ve vowed to make an entry!
Some things I’ve noticed:
Animating humans is much harder than animating quadrupeds. At work I’ve been animating zebra’s and it seems to be easier because they have a larger COG, this enables any pose to feel balanced quickly. With humans it’s because we see them so often I guess and also the centre of gravity doesn’t have that much area to play with so you have to move the control more precisely. Something you might notice is that the movements are quite big and I think it’s a product of animating the animals, but also lack of subtle experience. I definitely want to tackle that with the second guys performance and go with very small movements with mainly eyes, brows and head. Also need some help thinking of a setting for these guys, a background of some sort. I know that it’s about the character animation and I probably don’t even have to bother much with it, but it would be nice. Saying that I probably should have thought up a situation before going this far. Lack of planning. Alas my experience is tree is being watered and is growing strong.
If you have something to say, please comment I’d love to know what you think. All comments are helpful.
Really wanted to know how to get fine controls, and this is what I have so far with a joint driven system. Seems Fun to animated and I think overall suits my animation style. I like controls in space, feels more like interactive sculpting of a pose rather than the sliding of an attribute off somewhere else.
So here’s the setup and a video showing the results, I was going to make a video tutorial, but seemed easy enough to understand from the diagram.
Rigged him up quickly and animated a run. He doesn’t have all his extras on yet, but I was eager to animate something 
Dictionary definition : apples and oranges (of two people or things) irreconcilably or fundamentally different.
Whilst both can’t change what they are, they are both tasty and nutritional. Although I guess apples do have the upper hand since there’s all kinds of proverbs after them ;P
The leaf looks really funky, like it’s plastic. It could be because of the lack of subsurface scattering happening. maybe… what I do know is that I need more practice!
Going to basics, observing and painting. I painted in monotone first and then played with the blending modes to get colour variation in the skull. There a few things I plan to increasing in skill, one of them is painting. So onward! More practice please.
After browsing the game art forums, I was inspired to paint some rocks. It’s very relaxing and the concept of time begins to dissapear as you paint shapes and visualise forms, then fill in the shadows and highlights. Oh and also looking at real world and game reference helps too the journey of more practice continues:
