Stage 054: Fixing The Body To Finish Shot4

Stage 053: Cleanup003 Feet And Ears

Stage 052: Cleanup002 And Ground Plane

Happy Mothers Day All!!!

May B-day card

Stage051: Cleanup001 And Betty's Ears

Stage 050: Betty Timing Fix

Stage049: Betty Rig Fix

Stage 048: Spline And Loxo Rig Fix

April is coming up, help spread the April joy.

April's Birthday Card

Had some small issues with corrupted files but I was able to save this sample image of April's Birthday Card.  I will continue tomorrow.  Enjoy.

Stage 047: Betty's Skin Weight Fix

Stage 046: Bettys Weight And Secondary Action Trunk

Stage 045: Betty Weight Cleanup And Eyebrow Animation

Stage 044: Betty Pose Fix

Stage 043: Loxos Nose And Poses Fix

Step 042: Loxos Lips And Poses Fix

Stage 041: Bettys Lips

Playblast without syncing problems

I am adding the playblast of the shot so far as a few of you have mentioned that there seems to be a syncing problem recording one the video.

Stage 040: Blocking Shot04 Third Pass Loxos Jaw

Stage 039: Blocking Shot04 Third Pass Bettys Jaw

Stage 038: Audio Fix 001

Stage 037: Blocking Full Second Pass

Stage 036: Blocking Shot06 Second Pass

Stage 035: Blocking Shot05 Second Pass

Stage 034: Blocking Shot04 Second Pass

Stage 033: Blocking Shot03 Second Pass

Stage 032: Blocking Shot02 Second Pass

Stage 031: Blocking Shot01 Second Pass

Stage 030: Blocking Frist Pass

Please forget the funny sounding person that made the audio.  I am in search of better audio right now.

Stage 029: Blocking 1250-1500 Frames

Stage 028: Blocking 800-1250 Frames

Sage 027: Blocking 450-800 Frames

Stage 26: Blocking 200_450 Frames

Stage 25: 0-200 Frame Blocking

Stage 24: Camera Blocking

Stage 23: Rigging Reel

Rigging Reel Feb2012 from Nathan Bryan on Vimeo.

Here is the official rigging reel for Loxo the Elephant which so happens to also be the only Rigging reel that I have until I can put a few more characters and some animations on here.

Stage 22: Background

Stage 21: Scene Organization and Background Blocking

Stage 20: Rig Fix

Stage 19: Animatic

Today I finished up the basic storyboards and worked on the animatic.

Stage 18: Storyboards

Just a small update today.  I am still working on storyboards and rearranging them and taking some out and adding new ones to get the story to flow smoothly.  Tomorrow I will be finishing them up and making an animatic and perhaps work on the background some.

Stage 17: Storyboards/Background

Now that I have the characters that I knew I wanted for this project, I have set out t o find a story.  Yesterday, I watched reference video for ideas and today I started with writing up ideas and sketching them out.  By no means are these necessarily finalized but they are a start to storyboards and color scheme for the background.  I will not post all of my storyboards here for the sake of literary privacy in this story.

Stage 16: Reference

Now that I have some clear ideas of what I am working with, I will start drawing up storyboards and background designs together. The idea is to have a cohesive story that goes from one emotion to another. The background is not thought of as a separate entity but as an emotional support to the story.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/9QkdA3dVO70
http://www.youtube.com/embed/XWPAAgedh8w
http://www.youtube.com/embed/K3UPwIGVnnk
http://www.youtube.com/embed/rpvp4x7Qm40
http://www.youtube.com/embed/7Fw2mxAamqE
http://www.youtube.com/embed/sVVorvXojhE
http://www.youtube.com/embed/oIBJv-rQk-U
http://www.youtube.com/embed/RvMkxvYEAAE

Stage 15: Betty?

Stage 14: Rig Completion

Stage 13: Skinning Eyes, Neck, Torso, Front Legs

Stage 12: Skinning Face

Stage 11: Rigging Face and Skin

Stage 10: Rigging Ears

Stage 9: Rigging Nose, Eyes, Organization, Head and Connections

Stage 8: Skeleton Nose, Spine, and Tail(Back-log)

Stage 7: Skeleton Reverse Foot Controls(Back-log)

To get this pivot-point controller simply use the connection editor to connect the "CENTER" of the pivot-point controller to the "ROTATEPIVOT" of the foot controller.

Stage 6: Skeleton Reverse Foot(Back-log)

Today, I duplicated the skeleton to make an IK or Inverse Kinematic version and an FK or Forward Kinematic version.  I hid the FK version and left it for later.  Start the IK feet exactly like you would a Bipedal rig.  Create a reverse foot setup by making a separate joint chain starting at the heel, going to the toe, ball and ankle in a revers direction from you IK joint chain.  Hide these, we will use them soon.  Next, create a Rotation Plane IK Handle from the shoulder to the ankle and two Single Chain IK Handles from the ankle to the ball and from the ball to the toe.  Un-hide the reverse feet.  You can choose to parent or parent constrain the IK Handles to the corresponding reverse feet joints.  I chose to parent constrain just because it keeps the systems separate.  Make sure you save now as any testing of the reverse feet before a pole vector is in place may cause shifting of joints.

Stage 5: Skeleton Layout(Back-log)

Today, I set up out the bone structure.  This is the stage were I need to think about how the character is going to move.  As you should notice, I arranged the spine, tail and nose in straight lines so that the rotations will be completely even throughout them.

 The feet are unique on Loxo as I am planning on having a little more control here.  I am playing with the squish an stretch of the patty pad on the bottom of the heel.

In the torso, I have added extra controls in the center of the body to control how Loxo would move his legs from side to side or do actions that mimic the splits.  The hind legs rotation point is fairly low so I raised this rotation point so that he can potentially have more poses in the hind quarters.

For the ears, I wanted as much control as possible...  As you can see, the ear will be controlled through one joint at the meatiest point at the top and then drop down and out from there.  This control will mimic secondary action.

At the end of the nose, I added a couple extra joints to control the hand motion that an elephant has with their nose.

In the face, you will notice that the nose drops down from a joint that I will be using to control the nose bounce when he is talking.  The lower jaw is controlled by a joint and the eyes are each controlled by joints duplicated for the eyelid movement.

Stage 4: UVLayout(Back-log)

This days assignment for myself was to arrange the UV's.  This was a very simple assignment.  I no longer have the program that made this step easy so I had to go through and layout the UVs the old fashioned way in Maya.  I separated the trunk from the head and everything else was about the same as laying out the UV's for any character.

Stage 3: Body Modeling(Back-log)

On this day, I worked on cleaning up the body, connecting the head and adding the ears.  Here is where I smooth things out and cleanup where the creases will be.  I am keeping things low poly but going between level 1 and level 3 smoothness to test what it will look like.  Before the end of today, I will smooth it over once with the intention of adding wrinkle geometry in the trunk and forehead.

I smoothed out the dramatic curl of the legs and added padding to the feet.  I am planning on getting really close to this character which is why I am concentrating on small details.  As you can see on the stomach, I have added the skin flaps that stretch between the front and hind limbs.

As you can see, the mouth is smoothing out and I am not using the traditional edge-loops because I am more interested in the edge-loops around the nose and eyes.

I simply extruded the ears once out and once down to get that elephant earlobe shape.  I transform the faces by hand so that the ears are not perfectly flat.

I smooth once to get enough geometry for the wrinkles in low-poly.  The poly count is beginning to rise but this should be the last level for low-poly.

For your amusement, the low-poly model.

A turnaround with a color test.  I want something that is almost skin-toned to make the audience relate to the character.

This image, as you see on the cover, is a wrinkle test.  These are not the final wrinkles but they give you the idea.

Stage 2: Body Modeling(Back-log)

I continued blocking in the limbs and head.

With the legs, I curled the knee area inward to mimic the way that the muscles work in the elephant legs.  The heels of the feet are raised up by heavy padding which will compress a little when he stomps on them.

The toes do not move separately.  I simply extrude them into the shape of an elephant's toes.

I modeled the head separate from the body so that I could concentrate on detail and add it together later.  The nose is extruded outwards and the eyes are extruded inwards to control the edge-loops.  Since the mouth is almost secondary to the nose, I did not make edge-loops there but simply made sure that the edges flowed smoothly in that area.  Emotion will later appear in the forehead, eyes, cheeks and the bouncing of the nose itself.  I will define this more at a later stage.

For the tail, I watched the anatomy.  The tail seemed more like a tapering of the body into a rounded point so that is what I did by merely extruding it out.

Stage 1: Model Body(Back-log)

Extruding from a cube, I model it much like a bipedal torso, concentrating on the edge-loops around the limbs while leaving enough space under the body for the flaps of skin that lie between the front and back limps.

The Beginning of the Blog

I just updated my profile picture on facebook to where my current progress on the project is.  Until I have caught up with my updates, I will load two updates per day.

Coming Soon!!!