Tag: Characters

I have finally finished weight painting. It took far longer than expected as every time I finished I would check through all of the joints to make sure they’re all correct, and each of them would have something wrong with them. This happened many times and was very frustrating to have to keep doing.

I originally had the top hat and bow tie binded as skin to the joints so that I wouldn’t have to manually move them during the animation, but that created so many problems with weights on the wrong joints that I eventually unbinded them and have decided to just move them manually.

I think I’m going to keep the current colour scheme as I quite like it after spending all this time looking at it, and the hat and tie colours aren’t too bad to pair with it. They’re a little dark but I can brighten them before I animate them if I want to.

For the animation sequence, I think I am going to have Mr Squid over here float up and down for a bit, land on the ground, mess with his attire, and then signal to the audience. This will take quite a while to keyframe as Mr Squid isn’t a humanoid, as you can see, so I can’t use motion capture to apply an animation to his rig, which is very annoying as I was able to apply an animation to a humanoid rig during class quite easily.

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.

I have added the eyes and altered the eye sockets to attach to them. It wasn’t the cleanest job as when using the quad draw tool I ended up with an awkward placement of faces in some areas, so behind the eyes isn’t the prettiest, but I have removed all unnecessary faces behind the eyes that can’t be seen to reduce the polygon count.

As you can see in the image above the squid is definitely looking better with the eyes. I have also modelled a bow tie and top hat using the videos below and placed them on my character.

If you don’t want to watch the video, I shall now put a quick overview of the tools used to make the bow tie. You start with a cylinder, turn it on its side and scale up the long side. Then you want to add subdivisions and use the twist tool under Deform > Nonlinear. Duplicate the model and erase the old one. Smooth the model to add extra polygons and then use sculpting tools to add any details you want. After you’ve finished making any adjustments you want to the details of your model, you then assign the velvet material preset to the model and customise as you want. I also used the bend tool under Deform > Nonlinear to get the tie to curve in on itself a little as it was clipping through my model before.

The next video I only used the first minute or two and textured the model in the same way as the previous video. There was a lot of inserting edge loops and extruding for this model.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep the current colours and/or material on the tie and hat once I colour the character model, but at least they bring life to the character. Now to rig the character, and animate.

I have finished using the quad draw tool to create a lower poly version of my character and I have smoothed it by one division. Below is the new model (right) next to the old model (left).

Next is to model the little accessories for the squid, add the eyes and alter the eye sockets to fit, rig the model, and finally animate.

I have rounded out the tentacles and added eye sockets onto the model. Adding the edge loops to make the eye sockets seems to have defined the squid to look malnourished. This isn’t great, especially since it looks more creepy than cute now, but it is acceptable as the tentacles are also smaller and a little different to the original concept art.

I have smoothed out the model, which has added a great deal of polygons to the mesh so next I will be using the quad draw tool to create a model over this one with far fewer polygons.

I started work on the tentacles of the squid using the symmetry tool but annoyingly you can’t do symmetry on two different axis at the same time. So, I decided to do symmetry on one axis and just focus on those tentacles before then doing the rest. For some reason, however, when shrinking some areas of the initial tentacle, the symmetrical tentacle woouldn’t always do the same, leaving me with two different size and shaped tentacles. It was then that I remembered about mirroring and just decided to do one tentacle and mirror it twice. The below image is the smooth result.

I haven’t finished modelling the tentacles, but having all four of them in place gives me a better idea of how it should look when done. You can also see the tentacles are all pointing upwards when in the designs half are pointing downwards. I have found modelling them downwards is much harder for me than modelling them upwards, plus the modelled position doesn’t matter since they’ll all be animated anyway.

Next I will need to make the tentacles thinner, rounder, and possibly move them further down to allow for a longer body. Then I will need to model the eyes in the head and smooth the entire model.

I imported the front and left side views of the design into Maya and added them to an unselectable layer so that I can model with guides that won’t be selected whilst modelling.

Ideally, a cylindrical shape would’ve been best to start with but I figured the faces on the bottom would be awkward to use for the tentacles, so I started with a cube. I selected all of the vertices on each corner and moved them to the furthest points on the references to map out how big I would need the cylinder to be. I then made a sphere the same size as the four points and placed it above the cube and then started moving all of the vertices on the cube to match the circumference of the sphere. That gave me a cylindrical shape with the end faces of a cube. After that I just selected groups of edges and expanded or contracted to get the width of the cylinder in different areas roughly correct. I also used the soft selection tool to raise the top faces evenly.

In hindsight, I probably could’ve made a cylinder and cube and deleted the faces I didn’t want and connected the rest together.

Below, in white, are the attempts before the one shown above, not including the model that disappeared on me.

The left most white model I got the tentacles out front and back, but I couldn’t get them to look natural going diagonally. probably because of how flat/square the whole thing was. The next one I was having difficulty just doing the tentacles at all. I then tried a different way of doing them on the third model but that only worked if you’re looking at it straight on. The fourth model I moved vertices using symmetry but that didn’t quite give the natural spherical look, and the bottom was still very square.