Bodypaint


I have been trying to make my life easier by using a quicker tools to paint onto a character rather than going through the whole UV unwrap process, I did find a pretty damn nifty program called Bodypaint. it is very easy to import your character directly into this program as it unwraps it for you and then paint onto it there and then whilst you can see your 3d model, hell you can even paint directly onto your 3d model . it takes very few processes and wont leave any seam marks at all. I did however find that if I wanted to create bump map you would still have to stretch realign the UV map but I couldnt be bothered to learn how to do it again in another program, at least not now as I have a big project on the go. It's definitely worth a look though and could save your hide in the future if you have the time to learn how to use it - It only took me about 1 hour of playing around with it and looking through a few tutorials online to get a basic of it (it's basically Photoshop but with 3D).


Heres an example me playing around with it.



...Oh and here's a link for the free Demo version if you want.

Character designs:

Well... I wish I could say that I am as satisfied with my characters as I am with my 'sets' so far, I have got a few good process pictures which I will provide below and maybe comment on a few.


This is my characters model process, basically it all started with a hand drawn image that was scanned in and projected onto three panels (boxes) - I started out with a cylinder and the rest is... well... history.











Heres a little test with symmetry on












...and the almost complete version which I'm no impressed with at all and may even consider creating a whole new one over the holidays

Here is a close up of the face, I have decided to use individual teeth instead of extruding them out of the skull as I think this will give me more control and realism. I have also added a raytrace reflection to the eyes to give more realism (I also need a reflection of fire in his eyes for one of my scenes)

The model now needs 'skinning; however I have wasted the better part of a week trying to find a better was of UV unwrapping instead of the traditional way - You can read all about this above this post.

A bit of set design:

I have been quite busy lately designing the set for my 'Odd couple animation' and am finding it to be very entertaining and the fact that it is going smoothly I am finding quite surprising. here are two render's... the first is the kitchen so far and the second is the living room, these are not complete yet as I'm still texturing objects, walls and also scaling everything to the right size but the majority is done. I am also happy with the render times - remember to click on the images to get a bigger picture


I am pretty impressed with the results so far, I cannot however take all the credit for the props design as I pinched a few from a website called 'Turbo squid' - the link can be found here, I was confident that I could create these models and possibly better than some but thought it would be a waste of time in doing so, after all more time not modeling gives me plenty more time to work on lighting and animation.

I am still not too sure on how to cut holes into my walls ( You will notice a giant block on the right hand side of the kitchen sticking in the wall) in a stage design program I am used to called 'Hammer editor' the technique of making room for a door is making a block the size of your door, moving it into the wall and then cutting the hole with the block... it seems it's not that simple with 3D's max however I'm sure Andy will have a solution.

The good 'old walker'

Ah yes the good old walker, thank you very much Andy for the recap it was invaluable for practice and also to realize how much time it is going to take to create the 'odd couple' animation (means I gotta get my ass into gear and stop partying) - here is the walker cycle I did, I admit the character plummets into darkness a bit toward the end, this is what I wanted however. I added some sounds to make it more realistic (sounds found here) - as my third year friend Todd Gledhill said 'if you going to do it good, you may as well do it right and if u want to do it crap then do it crap' , I did want to do it with raytracing on the surrounding box too, however the estimates render time was 7 hours compared to 10 minutes for this render (without the raytrace on the box but with the raytrace on the character)- anyways, I enjoyed the result and I hope you do to. here it is.





Heres a shot of a fully raytraced image - click on it to get the full size of it. not that much of a difference eh?... well... I'm lying there, the reflections of lighting are much smoother, the feet are not fully on the ground (something I fixed later) and the characters legs are also reflected but I still didn't think it was worth the 7 hour render, I should have cheated and made the box rusty, henceforth no reflection... Ian ur a genius hehehe!!

Visit to a museum:



I went to a museam a while back in Stoke on Trent and had a quick 'nose' around - after all it was free and there is nothing better to be heard or saw by a student than the word 'Free'... accept 'Free alchol!' (crowd boo's)

Uhum... well I better get back to the museum story I guess. There where some really interesting artifacts dated back to when Stoke-on-Trent was actually a thriving city, mostly specialising in decorated ceramics (some really expensive stuff like Spode for instance) - however it was soon cheaper to import ceramics from China and thus it became almost non profictable for Stoke-on-Trent to continue producing thier fine wares... quite a pity.

However that is a bit of a letdown to Stoke-on-Trent's past, two of the other things I found out was that the Captain of the Titanic (E.J Smith) was Born here and so was the famous inventor(R J Mitchell) of the 'Spitfire' fighter plane which they have on display at the museum, it is the Mk XVI Spitfire (type 361) which was designed to be a low altitude fighter

it was an interesting visit and I reccomend that if you are even in Stoke-on-Trent (Hopefully you never have to) you should visit the museum and also possibly the scate park.

Some character study

I have been looking for some interesting examples of violent animation comedy for my 'Odd Couple' project, I looked at a few examples of Tom and Jerry which seemed to fit in rather nicely apart from the fact that there is never any standoff in my animation. I did however come across some pretty interesting but also rather 'disturbing' dark comedy on my search - some short animations titled ' happy tree friends'. at first I thought it was a children's cartoon but something in the back of my head told me that I had heard the name before.

I have posted a few below for anyone who is interested in watching - please be aware though that you may not enjoy the content or even find it remotely funny.