New website.

Well this project is over, but in the meantime I would like to introduce my new website:

www.jamesstone.co.uk

Please visit it for more work from James Stone.

Animated

Turns out I did have time to animate Boris. Below is the animation, enjoy!

Final Model and Render

Finally finished! Above is the final render. I've put the model in 3 different poses to show a range of emotion and rendered them out to a massive resolution for printing. The model has had a good response from CGtalk along with other forums, the link for CGTalk is below:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=442806&page=1&pp=15

For a more detailed look at my work in progress and for things that I have not covered here please also look the following links:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=423600
http://www.3d-tvu.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=168&start=0

Although I would love to animate Boris for this project I don't feel that time will allow it due to my other assignments, we will see by week 14. All that's left for me to do now is produce a W.I.P. brochure for this project and author it to DVD.

Huge Update!

I've been focusing massively on this project lately but have unfortunately neglected this blog by not posting the updates... to simplify things I'll break it down into stages; first off I created a huge blend shape library for this character by using Mudbox and the soft mod tool in Maya. Soft selection in both programs made this task a lot easier because before this technology was around creating blend shapes was based on pushing thousands of vertices and each shape could take hours to realise, with my technique I can create complex shapes within minutes. Obviously this was only possible to do in such a short time with a good mastery of the software but nevertheless it sped up my work flow immensely.


The next step involved creating a user interface that could link all of these shapes and provide animators with control to mix and match different shapes to create complex emotions. I purchased a DVD (Digital Tutors Facial Rigging for Facial Animation) that I found infinitely useful and showed techniques that could give me a robust rig. I used this along with books I have previously mentioned.

The user interface was created with Nurbs Curves in the shape of a head. All channels that were not used were locked and hidden so that an animator could not break the rig even if they wanted to. Each control is also given limit information so that the control cannot be moved further than desired. After this the controls are linked to the blend shapes via set driven keys that then drive the shapes.


There is a lot more to it but for the purpose of the blog I have simplified it to the best of my ability, the rig also has severla other unique features that will be documented in the final report.

The next step was to texture the model. For this I sampled parts of high res photos and merged them over my uv mapped texture, after a couple of days work I ended up with the result below. Some elements were hand painted and some photo referenced, all in all it gave a very fleshy and skin like feel. The stubble was created with a custom brush in photoshop.

After this I rendered out an image with this mapped on a Blinn shader, the results were far from satisfactory. This was one of the hardest parts of finishing the model. To create a skin shader is enormously difficult, skin has unique qualities that standard materials just don't have, the main one is sub-surface scattering. The skin gets its tone from being made up of several layers, the light penetrates the outer layer which gives skin a rich tone and also enables us to see mottling and blood vessels underneath. The shader I created took a week to develop and was heavily trail and error. The shaders are also dependant on your light setup and fancy shaders take a long time to render. Taking all these things into account along with displacement mapping and global illumination can result in mammoth render times for mediocre results.

However, after a weeks rendering, tweaking and hard slog I was able to get the result below rendered at 720X576 in just over two minutes. I was extremely pleased at this result and can render most animations with this overnight.

So whats left to do? As we speak I am working on the teeth and gums and then all that needs to be done is animate and package the whole project together into something presentable.

First animation test has already been done and can be viewed below:

Modeling

Been a while since my last update.

Since then I've been read up on a lot of great material. 'Art of Rigging' (Post below) has been great for the technical aspects and interesting features I can put into a rig. 'Stop Staring' is also a fantastic resource, it documents modeling, rigging and animating faces in a very easy to read, fun, manner. I have also watched many Digital Tutor clips on facial rigging. All of this research has provided me with some great knowledge of what to put in the rig as well as how to go about doing it.

In the meantime I have also been modeling. The final character is above, I'm really pleased with the result and feel if the texturing,rigging and animating go well, it will be a great showreel piece. Although the mesh for the above piece is extrmemley dense and weighs in at 4million ploygons due to the high level of detail it is still very much useable. I have researched into displacment mapping techniques which will give a low poly model (below) incredible detail at render time but at the same time provide a workable mesh that is fine to animate with.

Similar to my other projects I am also running a thread online at the university forums, so as to get critiques, advice and encouragement from my peers. On the thread you will find more detail regarding UV mapping and displacement mapping, including example maps.

http://www.3d-tvu.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=168&start=0

Next stage, internal mouth modeling and blendshape modeling.

Art of Rigging

Forgot to post this. I've been recently reading a book called 'Art of Riggin' vol1. It has some great in depth discussion on facial rigs that have particularyly interested me. Above is an example of one of them, and what I am aiming for upon completion of this module. Essentially its a model being controlled by Nurbs curves as I described earlier. The curves are set up in the shape of a face so as to give an animator easy to use visual feedback rather than using sliders.

Ideas

Did a bit of modeling practice over the weekend, I just used it to get my modeling speed and skills a bit sharper. I uploaded recordings of it to YouTube too so that I can post it here. Basically they are all speeded up versions of what I was doing. Starting off with a base mesh I made and just playing around with different ideas. It was quite fun. The goblin head took 45 mins and the old man head took 30.

Sketch

Did a couple of sketches and ideas for the character head I'm going to do. I'm looking for something fairly stylised and low poly so as to animate and have fun with without taxing the computer too much. Going to do some more tonight...