Tom's nCloth quest

After days and days of tutorials and repetitions I think I've finally worked out this nCloth business. All I wanted was for the tail of his coat to be nCloth so that it would react to him and the world around him without needing to be rigged and animated (looking impressive in the process), this caused many problems though as I couldn't get to grips with the basics of it. I think I've got it down now, we'll just have to see how well it works when rigged and moving.

Testing nparticles from Jake

so there is a few shots in our film that require moving fluid in a bottle, and one shot where the character pours some out into a plant pot. so i have been messing around and trying to figure out nparticles and creating this gooey plant food substance and have it react with the vial. so i have been learning all about how to create ncache and optimising the scene for playback, it's quite a complicated one but i got there in the end.

TA DA!

Tom's first post

After a long and arduous game of catch up I'm somewhat at the same level as Jake now. The Charlatan has been modelled, unwrapped and textured, and I've finally gotten through building all of the props.

This is the humble beginnings of the Charlatan. I always envisaged the proportions and stature of this character being slightly more exaggerated and cartoon like than the other characters thanks to his particularly dastardly and larger-than-life persona, but I'm being careful to make sure he looks right with the other characters.

Here, he's nearing completion but there's still kinks to fix. I've gone too far with some of the proportions (arms, hands, facial features) and bits of geometry could do with being tidied but the original design is shining through and the finished product is nearly in sight.

And finally, a render of the basically finished Charlatan. Like cleaning, modelling is a job that is never quite done and I'm sure there'll be a tweek or two to be made before rigging, but I'm happy enough with this for it to be rigged (which is exciting). Unlike Jake and Pat I've never rigged a character before but I'm hoping a combination of enthusiasm, their expertise and my fondness of problem solving will get me through.

Lastly from Jakes posts for a bit

I have been slaving at this environment for weeks. the models are made from the original designs. the amount of textures, so many textures, too many textures, i think theres about 105 psd networks going on in this scene.

there is a lot of stuff going on here but, with the right lighting and some fancy mental ray we got what we want, some pretty renders and a good theme

I have been playing around with different lights to try and get that, warm feel on the farm, a lovely rural American sundown. here's a couple of tests  

and here is a pretty render

The rest of the son

So anyway heres the rest of the Son, i Don't have any progression pictures unfortunately, but you know how it is, you put your headphones in, start modelling and, ta da, few hours later you realise, oh i'm finished, oh well, sweet! 

Anyway next up is blend-shapes, and some sweet poses after rigging, well excited to get him moving  

character modelling, Son, the beginning

so we have been modelling and texturing for a while now, so we have had a play with getting some nice renders on the go just to make sure we have the original theme we wanted, I (jake) will show you some of the changed we made since design.

When modelling the son's head, we noticed that the shape was not really fit for 3d, i'll post a picture showing the first failed model compared to the one we decided to carry on with

i mean, from here you can see, the topology is wrong, the spacing of the geometry looked like a disaster, and the shape of the head just wasn't practical, this model was going nowhere.

This second model, looked a lot better, I had managed to capture the character back from the original designs and put it into the 3D model, the geometry needs a good clean but, he looks alright. i guess we added to much to his design and ended up ruining him, but here I modelled him from an older design. 

(here's the old design)

I almost forgot, here's the expression sheet, so you have an idea of what his head should have looked like.

some more character design

With the film, we really wanted to have a theme of 1920's prohibition, where people are poor, working for peanuts, cheating and stealing their way into fortune. Here are some of the final designs of the characters, environment and props that we will start modelling from, we have the van of the charlatan, the farm and three characters.