This past week has been spent on a lot of different things that will allow me to start the actual animation process of the project. I've made a lot of progress, and while it will take some time to get the effects and massive elements worked out perfectly, everything else is in pretty good order. Some things I've done this week, in no particular order, is prop work, lighting and texturing the environment, finalizing the character rig, facial blend shapes, eyes for the character, finalizing the model of the character, caustics in renderman, and trying to get them all into one scene.
Pictured above is a test to make sure that the scale between the character and environment is correct, and I also just wanted to see what it looks like. The lighting has a ways to go for when I start working on the legitimate scenes, but so far I think it looks really cool. Correction, it is really cool. Fact.
Another thing that took a bit of time was getting the scarf and shoulder pads of the character to look good and deform correctly with the body. I had to go in and work on the blend shapes so that the shoulder pads moved with the shoulders, and the scarf moved with the shoulder pads. It also had to deform with the face, but have the influence fall off as it went down the scarf and not have a 1-1 thing going on.
The shot above is a few frames into a walk cycle I'm working on that I can import into massive and see how it works. So it's not the most exciting posture, but it's one of many "mini" animations that I have to do for animation trees within massive.
One thing that I worked on for a great deal of time is the blend shape facial animations of the character, and the facial rig. A lot of people like to use sliders with their blend shapes, and what I have isn't too far removed from that, but I find it more intuitive to have a facial GUI that represents the expressions you want to give your character.
I've hit a hurdle this week, just as I did in my past project with blend shapes. Hopefully some sleep and contemplation will help me figure it out. For some reason, when I use the blend shapes to influence of the main mesh, other parts of the body start to deform. If I activate multiple blend shapes at a time, things get crazy, and the mesh looks horrifying. I've messed with input order and re-applying the blend shapes. I may have to export the skin weights, and start over with a new mesh. It wouldn't take too long to try, but I don't want to do it unless I absolutely have to.
Above is a shot of the blend shapes I have. Since the body of the character is one mesh, I had to use the entire body for the blend shapes, even though I'm only deforming the face. There is a way to use just the head, but it takes a few more steps than I'm comfortable with, and don't want to waste time right now trying to figure out a new way to apply blend shapes. If I can't figure out how to fix what I have now, I might have to look into it, but hopefully it won't come to that.
Another thing I decided to do was experiment with caustics in renderman for the various light sources that will be lighting the room. I decided to have the light emanate from crystals in ornate lamps placed throughout the chamber. I had messed with caustics before, but only in mental ray. It took a while to figure out who renderman dealt with it, and even longer to come up with the right look for both the lamp and the crystal.
As you can see pictured above, I spent time modeling, UV'ing, displacing, and texturing the lamp, as well as figuring out how to texture and light the crystal with caustics. Next up on the to-do list is to figure out what's wrong with my blend shapes, get some animations finished, and import them into massive and see how that fares.
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