Character modelling and animating
This week was started with desperately trying to find a basis to plan our environment modelling on. On the monday I finally found something suitable, which was 3 models from Little big planet 3. I then used these to set an estimate on our small, medium and large assets. Here is the final tech spec sheet signed by us and our supervisors Mike and Craig.
Getting back into the swing of things I decided to find out how I would model and animated the fire and water characters. So unsure how to animate an non-human/non-animal I took to the internet in search for an answer. Unfortunately I couldn't find any tutorials showing what I wanted to I jumped on to Sketchfab.com and found one of my favorite modellers and animators that tends to do obscure non-human/non-animal models and rigs for games; so I sent them a message not expecting a reply but luckily I got a lovely email back saying that they use a certain type of software to rig found here: http://www.anzovin.com/tsmg/. This wasn't quite what I was looking for but it's still helpful and something I will be keeping an eye out for if it goes on sale.
As a back up I had sent an email to Craig asking if he knew anything or anyone that would be able to help me, luckily Mike P is quite versed in this sort of thing and came and helped me. I explained the character and what I would need it to do and he showed me where to place the bones and how to move them to do what I wanted.
I needed a bone for the bottom, middle, top, a bone root (weighted to nothing), tail bone for the guys to attach objects to in engine such as a key (weighted to nothing) and the eyes have there own bones so they can move freely. To make them deform you scale, rotate and move the bones to get the jelly like animation.
He also showed me how to use vertex painting; In engine we set up a vertex animation which wobbled the painted verts using a sine curve.
You paint what you want to move white and what you don't black (note you can also use the RGB channels hence why there is red on his main body).
Here's the simple material that creates a basic wobble in the X and Y axis'. James has taken these and made a more complex version splitting up the bottom and top of the model making the top move in large curves a little amount and the bottom move in small waves quickly.
I then got on to modelling the final design and ran into some problems. Everything was working fine at first until it came to exporting the mesh, bones and animation into UE4. All the settings were correct but it was corrupting and breaking the animation each time (the body was detaching itself during the animation). After trying everything else I imported the mesh into another max scene and redid the animation. This time the bones imported as helper rather than bones which worked a lot better but the issue still persisted so I researched to see if anyone else had had the same problem; I found out that I needed to resize and transform the bones and their pivots unfortunately this made these....
After fixing the bones, unskinning the mesh and resetting Xform the model was fine and exported into UE4 perfectly with the right animation.
Here's the graveyard of broken walters in UE4.
The final rig
The final model
Squish animation
This is Walter in engine with his bottom wobbling rapidly with his main body wobbling in large curves slowly.
I also started to work on Burnard but we have hit a brick wall and I don't know how we are going to model and animate him until he has a material and particle effect. However this is what I tried:
Model with no rig
Vertex paint
Custom material made making the body wobble slightly and they flame tips deform a lot. Unfortunately we are not 100% on using this technique for Burnard yet so it will take a bit longer to decide.
It was round this time that I got into making some colour swatches for the guys to do paintovers:
As I couldn't work on Burnard I moved onto working on Olive. I asked one of my character artist peers what she uses for ref and she gave me this:
I then used this as reference and made this model:
I then took it into photoshop and skewed/distorted the face to get it to fit Olive's.
Taking what I had done in Photoshop I warped the mesh the same in max and then took it back into Photoshop to paintover it and see what needed to be fixed.
After tweaking the verts and shape of everything I added some glasses and ears to make sure everything was placed correctly.
I then got onto adding some eyes and started to model the hair.
However I wasn't quite sure how I wanted the hair to look so I researched it until I found a tutorial/work flow of one that I liked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EZdeMx7oS8. At this point I also started testing how to make her plaits:
I do like these but they look a little bit too anime style which is something we are trying to stay away from.
I find that these look a lot better and are more realistic but they use a lot more polys and I don't have the budget to use these. So I will have to decide what I want to use later down the line.
I also looked into facial rigging and animation as it is something I am interested in and made it possible for it to be added into the game later if we wanted it. This is a great tutorial showing how to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULc93KNzrF4
That's all of this week I will be continuing with character development and helping out with level design in the next coming weeks.