Week: 25 – 31 October
This week I continued modeling the horse character from last week and the pending unfinished crab character I did during the summer break. I want to start with the animation as soon as possible, so I have to finalise both characters quickly including the rigging, UV map, and textures.
Crab Character: Modeling
The crab character still has several unfinished parts which are the antenna and the mouth area including teeth and tongue.
I started by defining and finishing the shape of the lip and the interior of the mouth
I then did a very quick models of the character’s tongue and tooth from basic cubes.
The tooth and tongue model were then placed inside the mouth. I duplicated the tooth into three more teeth with slightly different sizes and rotations to make it look uneven.
For the antenna, I duplicated one of the legs and modified the shape to make it look like the antenna from the sketch.
After the model finished, I think the single antenna looked a bit weird, so I decided to make it a pair.
While working on the modeling, I was also rethinking about the story of my FMP, probably changing to something related to student and university. Maybe the story will be about the characters going to class, similar to my reference for the crab character, which is Monster University. I will finalise the details of the idea and shots next week.
Crab Character: UV and Texture
I didn’t planned to have a realistic or painted texture for the character, but instead to use a simple procedural textures. So I need to unwrap the character’s UV first.
The first step is to mark the seams so Blender can unwrap each part properly, and I can have the texture seams at the areas I wanted, which are at the back and the bottom so they will not really visible to the viewer.
I duplicated the crab body parts to 2 or 3 more for color variations, so in the animation / shots I can quickly turn on or off the object in the collection to make the character look different between shots.
Crab Character: Rigging
For the character, I built the skeleton manually from scratch using the standard Blender bone.
Skinning and vertex weight
For the skinning process, I used the manual vertex value instead of the standard weight painting method. I prefer the manual method especially when the object has a low-poly state since I can choose and select the vertices easily.
For me it is multiple time faster to skin this way where I can just select the vertices and enter the intended weight to quickly make them following which bone I want, compared to using weight painting brush where we keep painting again and again to get the correct values for each body parts. This manual method is especially very effective when dealing with very narrow areas such as fingers. Using weight paint in this area instead can be very painful when it painted the wrong surfaces since they are very close to each other.
If I want the vertices around the character’s chest to follow 100% to the upper spine bone for example, I can just set those vertices weight value to 1.0 to that bone, and set the vertices loop between the upper and lower spine to the value of 0.2 so that it will follow the upper spine for 20% to create soft and smooth bend. It’s very fast and I can get consistent weight for all sides.
Horse Character: Modeling
After the crab character finished, I quickly worked on the horse character. The process was almost similar with the crab especially for the UV unwrap and rigging, so I will not described the process as detail as the crab character.
I started by reshaping the head and face to make it look more stylised.
I think the horse’s face look a bit fierce so I made more adjustment to the face again to make the character look more friendly. I enlarged the eye made it more round.
I also decided to reduce the number of hair on the character, and made the character to have a human-like hairstyle.
Horse Character: UV and Texture
Horse Character: Rigging
I used the same techniques as the crab character including the IK and the manual vertex weight value for the skinning.
After using the manual vertex value method several times for both characters, the only thing that really annoying was it will not automatically normalize the weight value to the sum of 1.0 between multiple bones that shared the same vertices. So I will need to use the ‘Normalize All’ function every time I entered new value to the selected vertices so it will deduct and calculate the balance weight values to the other bones. If I forgot to ‘normalize’, multiple bones can effect the same vertices with the same maximum weight which can cause the shapes to not properly follow the intended bones.
I used the manual vertex weight value when skinning in 3dsmax as well, but 3dsmax will automatically normalize the value. I’m not sure if I can do the same in Blender but I cannot find the way yet, other than to use the ‘Normalize All’ function.
Finally, I managed to finished both characters including the texture and rigging this week, so I can start with the animation as soon as possible. I planned to finalise the story first next week.