December 18 2015

Today, I kind of took a break. I did open up my blender and do a tiny bit of weight painting, but nothing much really. I just fixed some weights in certain areas. They don't look much different though because it is usually only by a few vertices. So now the waist moves a bit better with the rest of everything else. I put the project in my dropbox so maybe I can work on it a bit at home. but I don't know if I will or not yet.

December 17 2015

Today, I finished all the weight painting for the hands. And frankly, I think it looks really good!

Although the thumb isn't twisted nearly as much as I want it to be, I am sure it is a simple fix. Because I won't be actually changing the polygons, I don't think I will have any problems with the UV Map (at least i sure hope I don't)

Tomorrow, I will continue weight painting. And if I finish, I might take a small break because of how tedious and tiring this actually is.

After my break for the rest of the class, I will then take the animating by storm and finish it as soon as possible. 

If I finish animating in nice timing, I might just start a new project. Maybe figure out how to get it into Unity on my own as well as Emanuel.

December 16 2015

Today, I continued work on the weight painting. I basically finished the hands, I just need to finish the other hand.

In those two pictures, you can see where I have my weight painting done. So now each finger moves with the the hand, and I actually like the results I ended up with. They move pretty well. (but I only screenshotted the one finger because that is all I had done when I finished took the screen shot)

Tomorrow, I will strive towards finishing weight painting and start animating my character maybe this week. 

December 14 2015

I forgot to post this day, so I am posting it on Wednesday, because I wasn't here Tuesday.

Today I continued with my weight painting .Most of the weight painting is done. I am done down to the Root Bone.

In the next picture, you can see that each spine bone can move on their own now. All I have to do now is just finish the legs, then the hands. Then I am officially done rigging the model and can start Animating.

That is what I will be doing on Wednesday) 

December 11 2015

Today, I started weighting the character mesh where the armature will affect it. So when I move each individual bone, its corresponding assignment on the character mesh will move along with it.

The different colours represent the amount of weight on the mesh that applies to the bone. So the red is at 100%, yellow is 75%, and the green is just 50% and blue is 0%. You want to vary the amount of weight on the body that way it moves like a real body would. that was the whole point of modeling the character anatomically correct to the muscles in a human body. to assign weight, you must go into edit mode on the mesh with the armature in pose mode. Then select a bone, then select the vertices you want to be affected by the armature, then enter how much weight you want there to be, and then click assign and voila, you have made weight and the body part will now move.

I did it completely on the head, but not all over the arm so this next screenshot is of the head in a different position than normal.

I also just made it so I can't see the subdivision surface modifier for now that way it doesn't lag when i navigate the 3D viewport. 

Tomorrow, I will continue working on the weight painting of the character. Once I am done that, I can move onto animating.

December 10 2015

Today, I finished the armature for the model.

I just did it as if I were modeling the character itself, using the extrude function as my tool of use. Making the armature, I named everything as I went so it was easier to navigate. I also had to keep track of which way each bone was oriented in, because I want each bone to rotate in the x axis, I have to make sure each bone is rolled appropriately. Then, I had to make a hierarchy system of bones. Which means I have to make bones parented to other bones. that way, they are connected. In places like the hand, that is where it would be used most.

All those dotted lines signify which bones are parented to which. so all the bases of all the bones are parented to the end of the hand bone. That means when I rotate the hand bone, all the finger bones rotate with it.

I only made bones on one side of the model because I could just mirror the armature, names too. It is a really cool function that blender has. So, if I name a finger bone "index1.L" if I duplicate it with [Shift+D] then do [Ctrl+M] then just hit the [X] key, to mirror in the x axis, (all while the origin is in the center of the grid with the 3D Cursor) the bones would all be mirrored. But, with all those bones selected, and I hit the [W] key that comes up with special menu, and I select name mirror, it would switch from "index1.L.001" to "index1.R" and that is really helpful.

Now, the reason why orienting the bones are important, is so you can rotate them properly. So I wanted it to rotate in the X-Axis, just like a hand would. So if you don't orient the bones properly, they wouldn't rotate properly like so:

As you can see, all the bones are rotated as they would in a real life hand. 

Tomorrow, I will use the weight paint tool in blender, that way when I move the bones, the appropriate sections of the body will follow the bones.

December 9 2015

Today, I finished everything that has to do with texturing. That includes the eyes.

after I textured the inner eye, I went onto the outer eye. And what I did there was create a new texture, called it Eye.Outer and then went to the node editor to make it how I want it to look. It was pretty interesting because I switched the kind of texture it was from Diffuse BSDF to a Glass texture. Which made it transparent, and refract light.

On the left, is the inner eye without an outer eye piece. And the right is with the outer eye. As you can see, is refracts the iris to make it look like it comes out with the bulge, but it is actually just flat. And reflects some of the light from the other eye. 

Once I finished the texturing of the Left eye, I just deleted the right eye, and mirrored the left eye, separated the two, and renamed the other eye to eye.R and eyeOuter.R.  

I also started the beginnings on the armature rigging.

That is one bone. I will extrude multiple bones coming from that, to make the entire skeletal structure of the character, then I can go ahead and animate him. Then I can pass him off to Emanuel, and he can put him into a unity game.

Tomorrow, I will continue progress on the armature rigging.

December 8 2015

Today, I finished texturing.

  and fixed the problem I was having with baking my textures. The problem was because somehow, sometime during my process I selected a button that restricted rendering on my entire character. So I just had to unselect it and it worked. After that, I baked my normal map so now it has this purple/blue colour sheet containing all the bump information on my character. I also ended up going back to the node editor which I used a long time ago in the beginning of the semester. This was so I could apply my textures in the cycles render engine because I did all the texturing in the Blender render.

The only difference is, is that I had to add a UV Coordinator node so it knew where to find each texture in the given texture map. That way all the colours went to where they are supposed to go.

I also ran into yet another problem today. That I still need to learn how to fix. And it is with texturing the eyes of my character.

as you can see, the iris takes up the entire front half of the eyeball, which isn't quite right. To fix it, I need to use the proportional editing tool. But the problem is, is that the proportional editing tool isn't working for me. It just does everything normally as if I weren't using one. Which I don't want. And I don't know how to fix it. 

So tomorrow, I will figure out how to fix it, and then I think I will start rigging my character.

December 7 2015

Today, I started texturing and detailing the colours. I added some texturing to the pants, and leather vest.

as you can see, the front of the pants are nearly completed. I actually did complete them after I took the screenshots and ended up running into a problem while baking my textures onto one single square sheet of textures. And  I can't seem to get it to work. I run into a problem that states "No Images or objects found to bake to." And I tried looking it up, but I can't really seem to find a good tutorial on how to fix it. 

So tomorrow, I will be attempting to fix this so I can proceed to the rigging. Because if I have even one small problem like unable to bake, it could build into an even bigger problem.

December 4 2015

Today, I finished coloring. Now All I have to do is small colour details and texturing.

And I Kind of already started adding some colour details too. In the image below, you can see taht I have added some subtle freckles and blush around the mouth and eyes. And I do need to add the iris to the model as well. Then I can start rigging and animating.  

Tomorrow, I will be finishing the detailing and starting to texture him.

December 3 2015

Today, I began texturing. It is actually relatively simple.

Most of him is coloured with a diffuse layer. Meaning, that is is only a colour, there is no bump map, or specularity (reflection). All you have to do is switch your engine from cycles render, to the internal Blender Render, because that has more texturing tool than the Cycles Render. Then, you switch from Object mode to texture paint mode, then have at her. You can switch your brushes by selecting the brush icon, and choosing whatever brush you want. I have been using the fill brush, that way I don't waste any time. You can assign where the paint will go by selecting faces by turning on face selection mode. You also have to make a new texture before hand, so keep that in mind. And if you want to save your colour map, you have to save twice. Once you have to hover the mouse over the UV Map editing window, and hit [Alt+S] to save over the diffuse map. then hover over anything else and hit [Ctrl+S] to save blender file as.

So this is what I have today for my diffuse map.

you can see that everything on my model is unwrapped, and a lot of it is coloured, and I will hopefully finish coloring it tomorrow. 

December 2 2015

Today, I finished UV Mapping, I have the entire UV Map done, and I must now start texture painting on the character.

You can see that the black and white squares cover every piece on the model, and wherever the squares are small, that means that they will have a greater resolution than the rest of the model. So, on the face of the model, the squares are smaller than the rest of the model, that is because I wanted the resolution to be greater seems how that is where a lot of the focus will be.

And also, I organized the menu, by joining all the pieces except for a select few into one object.

All the things that aren't under the name "Character" haven't actually been mapped yet, but that is because the person I am watching says he will do something else with them later.

Tomorrow, I will start texturing the character.

December 1 2015

Today, I basically finished UV Mapping, and getting most of the pieces to be the proper size. All I have to do, is mirror the one boot and the arm, and eyes, then I can start texturing.

You can see that the squares are all an average size, that is because in the UV Mapping screen, you can change the size, and orientation with [Ctrl+A] to make all the islands an average size, and [Ctrl+P] to orient them in the square.

Tomorrow, I will be finishing UV Mapping, and starting to texture