Pokemans

Long story short: I just wanted a simple character to model and didn't want to get caught up being me and re-designing the idea 10 times over.  The project folder is even named "Pikachu_v1" because I knew I'd run into some problems that might by too far back to fix.  In this case I created a few small lumpy spots on accident that I didn't notice in time, and some parts just feel weird to me personally.  Also the UV map is a cringe-inducing mess.  Not my strong point, but it serves here unless you can see the chinks in the armor.

Things to do:
--Figure out how to do fur so it's not all facing one direction, though this will probably be patches of non-rendering NURBS with hair dynamics sprouting from them.  So far all experiments have been flops though, and I'll probably save that for another project.

--Fight the rig a little more, see if I can it at least to function a little.  Okay, my ideas are rather limited to animating and modeling.  When it comes to UV mapping, texturing, and rigging, I don't get far without copying wholesale from tutorials each and every time.

--Transition to Blender?  Maybe it'll be more stable and less likely to crash when sneezed at by am amateur.  Also no educational license 8)

If I can get the rig working enough, mirror it and not cringe in disgust, I'll spend a little time messing around with this little bugger.  The other goal of this project was to create something short and pudgy to see how many vertices I needed per joint to get it to bend in a way I liked.

3D Modeling/Animation II final

Welcome to community college.

Here you get to take pretty much whatever class(es) you want and hopefully pick up some job/life skills.  Or, if you forget to turn in your homework like I do... things get murky.

So the rig we were mostly experimenting with this semester was pure FK.  Basically you set up control objects on joints that don't render, and treat it like claymation in zero gravity.  After the midterm I Frankensteined the top half of that rig with an IK (Inverse Kinetics; honestly no idea how to explain this one) rig at the center pelvis/waist joint and somehow broke the thumbs.  Don't ask, I'm still not sure how I broke them.

The project had ups and downs to say the least, though the greatest down was trying to mimic a 2D movie in 3D.  Aside from inconsistent scene staging, character scale, limb placement, and lighting (this last one is normal in all movies actually) and uhhh... well it's a terrible idea for a class project.  Making up my own "inspired" material from a stolen source would have netted a project multitudes better than trying to copy frames and key frame/tween them.

Anyway, there will always be more excuses about things like painted weights (how joints influence the vector points--where the lines cross on the models), but this  enough excuses, on with the material:

I Don't 3D Model Very Often.

Currently taking my third class at a local community college (Maya1, Maya1 repeated, Maya2).  Self-improvement and learning need to start somewhere, I think I personally do best when launched first from a classroom setting and then tossed into the wild.