Creating a possible disappointment:

I have been working on my character which has to be presented on Wednesday, Of course as you would know if you have been reading my blog my character is a sort of devil thing. I hope I can get away with it this time as last time in school art class I drew a similar character I was instantly branded a satanist by the teacher (the joys of school in South Africa) - anyways, lets hope that doesn't happen again lol. I referenced the image I hand drew to create this character, I then wacked a few colours on him, gave him some awesome teeth and some funky eyebrows to help show expession all

has gone pretty well until I started with morph target. Let me explain : To get the eyebrows and get the in I had to up the amount of vertexes. Later I had to create teeth and create a smoothing effect for them so they would'nt look blocky and this also applied to the eyebrow which was also a solid block. after that I decided 'right, time to animate this bugger... what was it Andy taught us again, AH!! yes of course, morph targets' It was easy to create eyebrow expressions and morph the eyelids but when it came to the mouth I found that I had made so many damned polygons that it took ages to change the mouth, the fact teeth where morphing and changing shape didn't help but fortunately 'Soft selection' saved the day. after creating loads of these morph targets and linking them all I found that I was unable to link the eyes I had set to express anger (it consisted of 2 parts and didn't morph correctly) also I noticed my system was starting to respond slowly when I attempted to do this (which is pretty strange as it has 4 gig of ram , a 1 gig graphics card and AMD Daul core 3.2ghz Black addition CPU - In short, this shouldn't happen... ever!) I found out that the reason was because I was trying to trick the eyeball and the eyelid (last 3 to right hand side) to morph to something that had a FFD4 modifier on which it did not like at all. If I wanted this affect I would have to do this manually. I continued to make more clones of the body and made many, many expressions.

I then started to rig the character using the sheets that I had obtained from Andy Loves lesson, I ran into no serious problems at all and when I did I just reflected back on the sheets. I will not explain the process of how I rigged the character, I will just display a screenshot of the final setup. (click on it for a better look)


It was now time to animate, but first to put in the sound - I had great problems with the sound because 3d max would not import a 8 bit mono track (Dungeon keeps voice file) so I had to rune it through Quebase, convert it to stereo before it would work... to make matters worse the sound would only start from the very beginning of the time line and would not move further along the timeline to start at a different point, this was (mind the expression) a pain in the ass to correct, I had to search many forums to find the answer (eventually found it here ) - it involved opening a window called the dope sheet and then easily sliding the track along to the desired point.
All I really did then was add a box at the bottom of 'his' feet - added a bitmap material ( which was a screenshot of a stage I made for my first Identities project called 'Mr pickles and the lost coin'using Hammer editor for half life 2)to my materials library and dragged it onto the box.

After that I just animated the beast... Tip: before you start rendering always set your output file size to PAL (yes it's there). I then popped a few lights in to give me suttle shadows and then rendered it. to a AVI file... Which I hope will work :)