Advanced CG Week 7

This week has been spent on two things. The first has been getting my character into Massive without unforgivable, unspeakable things happening. The picture below is what nightmares are made of. It is the true face of terror and despair. What makes the situation worse is that it took a great deal of time and effort to get it to look like anything at all.


After some consultation and experimentation I more or less figured out the problem, which had to do with a combination of joint orientation, channels that should have been frozen, z-axis orientation, preferred angles, pole vectors, constraints, skin weights, and a bunch more. Basically everything was wrong to some degree (for massive), and needed to be redone. So a great deal of time has been spent re-rigging the character in the hopes that it won't make Massive become a fear-engine that bores a hole between this this dimension and some other dark realm of unfathomable horror.



After spending a great deal of time with the rig, I needed a break. I decided to take some time and refine my environment. It's not blatantly noticeable, but I went back into each and every texture in the environment and added more detail. I also messed around with the specularity and reflectivity of a lot of the objects, as well as added the lamp posts and crystals to the environment.


After I added more props to the scene I started messing with the lighting. What you see in these pictures aren't final, but they're starting to get to the final stage. I still need to figure out a way to optimize the caustics of the lamp crystals, and play with some light relationships, but for the most part its starting to represent my original vision.



Above is a picture of the alter that holds the sword. I hadn't shown it in a while, and figured I'd get a few up-close shots of it, since I think it looks pretty cool, and wanted to see what it was like in the entire environment.


Pictured above is the sword, which is currently a work in progress. Right now I have it placed within the sword altar, but it will be the sword the Hero (who I have named Lliam) is holding in the animation. The textures need some work, but I at least have the shape and general colors how I want them.



After a ridiculous amount of effort, I finally got my one rig to transfer into Massive without Wes Craven-esque deformations. I put some basic animation on the skeleton, and bound the geometry onto it, and so far it seems as if everything deforms ok.


As pictured above, one of my triumphs is that the bone tree actually looks like a figure. Before, when I imported my skeleton into massive, it looked like a jumbled mess. This was because of the character being oriented down the wrong axis, and a few other things that I fixed. What those other things are, I'm not entirely sure, since I tried so many things, but so far it works, and that's all I care about.

Next on my agenda is to get some Massive animation blends together and tested so I can start simming some scenes. I also want to get the lighting finished, and get the Hero character completely finished with texturing, hair, and scarf so I can start animating. Once I get some scenes rendering I can work on effects and massive on the side.