I have coloured the character different saturations of red to give it a more natural colour scheme. I have found this combination to be easy on the eyes as the colours are on similar wavelengths but they also contrast, helping them to stand out and grab your attention. I tried to colour the faces to look natural and curved, but in some instances this wasn’t as easy as the tentacles in the front. I ended up doing variations in what faces are what colour to add more detail to the model, and the curves from doing so look a lot better than if I had done jagged squares.
The velvet bowtie and top hat seem a little out of place with the simple texture of the character model, so I might change them later on but for now I will leave them until I have finished everything else.
Below is an image of the rig I set up for the model. There are five joints in each tentacle before connecting to the base of squid, and then there’s only a neck and head joint as the upper body is very simple in comparison.
You can see very faint lines attaching the tips of the tentacles to the main body. These are inverse kinematics handles to allow the entire tentacle to be controlled from the tip if need be.
The image below is of weight painting.
The grey area is the weight for one of the joints in the tentacles. It looks good in this image and nothing seems wrong, but when moving the joint other parts of the model that shouldn’t move do. This was very annoying. Turns out there was some weight in other areas that wasn’t being shown. Below is an image of what the weights actually looked like.
As you can see that’s a lot more than previously thought. And the default soft brush for weight painting was very bad at removing these weights. Luckily, I soon discovered that using the solid brush made the process so much quicker and easier to remove these invisible weights.
Annoyingly, something went wrong with Maya and it crashed when I had finished removing all of the excess weight. I had saved not long before, luckily, but my progress was set back to having to redo the weights.
Before I had coloured the model or started rigging and weight painting, I had a try and using blend shapes for the eye lids. the below image is of a duplicate model with the transformation applied to it that was to be used for blending. I haven’t gotten any further than this for blend shapes as I was getting frustrated with the models moving when they shouldn’t and other stuff, so I decided to come back to that later when I had cooled off and focused on the rigging.