Today was the last day I had to do any final work on my character. Although I didn't get nearly as far as I had hoped. I didn't get to animate, or even finish rigging. This was because I had small problems I didn't think much about, like sometimes I had a triangular face where it should be a square face. The idea is, that you want all the faces to be the same, whether they all be square, or all triangle, as long as they are consistent in shape. And that is my problem. The saying "One small problem can turn into one big problem if not handled correctly" was very true in this situation. Which manes me kind of mad to be totally honest. I could have fixed it if I were wary enough, alas, I was not. Nonetheless, I am still pretty happy with what I have.
For my final day, I really tried as much as I could to finish as much as I could.
I only got the entire left side controls functioning mostly correctly, but it is a lot of tedious, repetitive work. This was a fun project, but I don't know if I absolutely want to follow a 3D model career. It might be a career choice in the future if all else fails, but I will keep it as a hobby and will hone my skills over time. But I still have plans on creating an indie game of some sort. Which I am excited to get into pre-production now. Which is going to be art drawing, game mechanics, and storyboard pretty much.
The class was very fun, and I look forward to coming back next year. Thank you for letting me do this.
Today, I learned that I still need some custom shapes to do some rigging, and I still and running into problems with the rig. The foot doesn't deform properly, at all.
The foot deforms improperly, and I don't have a clear idea why. The tutorial I am watching di a lot of behind the scenes work, and I can't figure out exactly what he did. So I am just trying to figure it out.
You can see where I added some custom shapes, above the toes on each foot, is a half circle, that is supposed to be the toe's Roll control. But it still doesn't work properly. think it is because I need to parent it to another bone, but I don't quite know yet.
Tomorrow, I will try to fix everything, then animate on my own time so I can try to have it done over the weekend.
Today, I basically finished the Rigging of the Character. I just need to do the thumb, and eyes. Then I need to assign the shapes to their respective bones.
For the Hand, I had no idea what to do, so what I did, was just download the completed file, and then just try to make my own rendition of what he made, and that is basically it, just less messy.
Here you can see all the different shapes, excluding the one for the eyes. All I have to do is make the shape for the eyes, and then just assign each shape to their bones, then animate, then I will be done.
Today, I continued rigging some controls. Just by making circles and shaping and placing them.
I have them for Everything except for the Hands, and arms. I still have yet to actually assign their controls. So tomorrow, I will finish this off, and do some for the eyes and assign all the controls.
Today, I finished rigging the controls for the hands. I basically did a somewhat similar process as I did for the legs.
So basically, now when I rotate the very base of the finger, all the other bones copy the rotation of it. So it the first bone rotates by .3 Units, then so will the other two.
All of the middle bones of each finger have that exact modifier list, just with the bone according to the finger it is on. The Third bone of each finger has that too, just excluding the Rotation limitation. So each bone copies the rotation of the one before it, so in this case, the middle bone is copying the rotation of the first bone (in this case, ring1.L.001). And I did that with all the fingers with their corresponding bones.
Tomorrow, I will rig the hips and eyes.
And I also tried re installing blender, and it still didn't work to fix my controller issues.
Today, I continued with rigging. I thought I was done with creating bones, but I was not. It turns out that I need to so I can simplify the rig controls.
You can see plenty of new bones. They all contribute to the legs movement. The yellow bone there, contains an Inverse Kinematics modifier. It basically means it determines joint parameters that provide a position for the bone itself.
The foot IK is a second bone over top the original foot bone, it is the first green bone connected to the yellow. So now when I move that bone, it moves the legs while bending the knees, basically making it easy to animate. Then there is a bone for Toe Rolling, and Heel Rolling. Then the two colorless bones in a right angle, is the Foot Roll Control, and Foot Position Control. Unfortunately, I have some sort of bug or something that makes it so I can't use it on this computer. I have considered re-installing blender to see if that helps, but haven't brought myself to do it yet. But I should probably do it soon so I can actually animate the character.
Tomorrow, I will do this again, but the equivalent version for the hands.
Today, I finished weight painting; completely. All I need to do at this point is make controls so it is easier to animate, then I can animate my character mesh.
That is basically the weight distribution on both of the feet, and I also have it on the top with the next bone up, I just didn't want to take a screenshot becauseI didn't thank I would need to.
The foot bends really well, I am happy with these results. They are all bent around the X axis that way It will be easier to make controls and monitor the controls.
Today, I continued trying to fix the hand on my character mesh. I fixed the little spots in between the fingers, all I had to do there was re-position some points, and then I learned that they hadn't been assigned any weight yet, so I did that. Then I assigned weight to the rest of the inside of the hand. But I am still having problems with the thumb, although it is a lot better than before.
I tried doing the same weight assignment as I did on the left hand, (the hand mirror each other mind you) but I still get that ugly spot where the thumb bends.
Nonetheless, I think My mesh is good enough for me to start working on the lower half of the body, make some controls for the character, and then animate him.
Today, I didn't get very much work on, i really tried but I couldn't fix a very certain mesh problem.
When the fingers deform, they make weird shapes. I know it has to do with my inadequate weight painting skills, but it shouldn't be as hard to fix it as it is being. So I am going to bring it home so I can try to fix it there so I can do some more work tomorrow and over the next few weeks.
Today, I learned that I never actually saved the files when I weight painted the right hand. so I was doing that all today. and I started to fix my bones on the right side. Because some where along the way, I accidentally changed the roll value of them. So all the fingers, and thumb especially were negatively affected by this.
in the image above, you can see that all the bones are rotated in odd directions. I have already fixed the thumb, but now I need to fix the actual mesh for the thumb so it rotates properly with the fingers direction.
Tomorrow, I will fix the roll values, and I will try to fix the thumb's mesh so it rotates properly. Then I will continue with weight painting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
