This past week has been spent on a lot of things, and I've accomplished a lot. As you can see from the above shot, I've got a character with hair and eyebrows finally. After my previous blog post the issue that I had thought I had resolved turned out to not be. I also ran into another issue that has been causing me a ridiculous amount of problems with blend shapes (another thing I thought I had resolved earlier), and hair is still giving me a little bit of trouble. However, I've ironed out a great deal of the kinks, and almost everything is in working order now.
I still have some playing around to do with the environment and character, but it's really starting to come together. With the addition of the hair and eyebrows, the character looks a lot more unified with the environment, and is a lot closer to the original concept drawings I had made at the beginning of the term.
Above is a shot of the near final lighting sceme. I finally added the lamps near the altar, and I'm happy with the contrast between the blue and orange lighting. I was going for a complementary scheme on top of some earthy browns and dark blues. I still need to figure out what lights will cast shadows, and it'll take some tweaking so it doesn't take a million years to render.
These shots give a more detailed look at what the character looks like with hair. I also went back into his textures and gave him some more grunge, so it looks like he's been through some trials and tribulations.
With the hair I still get a few strange reflections where it picks up too much light. I imagine it has something to do with my specularity and gloss settings, but it's looking a lot better than it used to. If you look back at my older posts, you can tell that it's gone a long way. For the amount of time that I spent styling and grooming the hair, I could become a legitimate hair stylist.
Above is a working model of the shadow character agent in Massive. I have the scarf fully functional and dynamic. It needs a little tweaking with the gravity and friction settings, but overall I'm really happy with how it looks. It makes Massive chug a little bit, but I don't need too many agents so I'm not too worried about it.
I have a good amount of animation loops imported into Massive, and am currently getting them to blend together and adding them to the action tree of the agent. It's going slow, and Massive is the least user friendly software I've ever used, but so far its chugging along.
As far as problems I've run into this past week, they've been bountiful. Blend shapes still affected the body geometry, insteady of just the face as I had intended. I'm not exactly sure what went wrong, but I think it had to do with the naming convention I had for the blend shape geometry. I ended up deleting and reapplying the blend shapes to a proxy mesh, and then made a blend shape between the proxy and the main mesh. I had to paint blend shape weights onto the proxy mesh so that only the face could be influenced, and I'm pretty sure that did the trick.
I also am having a strange pole vector translation problem, and the hair gets a bit funky depending on the light angle. These are all relatively negligible things, so they'll be fixed in due time. Next up on the agenda is starting to finalize my Massive sims, and start animating the main animation. I also am researching how to use particles to make the shadow people appear. Until next week, stay classy.
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