Scene blockout part 1

Rough blockout of the storyboards to establish timing and camera movement.

Particle blood test

the blood particles had to be redered with the hardware renderer so would have to be composited after.

Starting blendshapes and junk

So Dan and Anna managed to finish the head models so that jake and I can star doing blendshapes while the sort out the bodies.

My progress thus far:

Normal mapping tests *POW*

Here is the low poly mesh (around 600 polys) whith a baked normal map from the high poly (over 600,000 polys). The progress for the modeling can be seen in Mr Ryan's blog.


I baked out an ambient map to use as a base for a quick texture test. Dan will do this properly when the time comes.

These screens are taken from the maya viewport with high quality rendering on. Mental ray still likes to blur the maps so the definition is lost.

Semi production schedule/plans type thing

Here are things that need to be done in order so that this things after can then be... done.

Character modeling (Low poly) - as long as the high poly detailing does not change the low poly dramatically we should be able to start...

...Rigging - I have discovered that making a head rig and body rig separately and the trying to combine them causes all kinds of problems. So, the plan is, when the low poly heads are ready we will make a rig for them (but not skin them) and create blend shapes while the low poly bodies are finished. We will then be able to move on to rigging the body and joining the meshes and skeletons before skinning them. While we rig...

...Environmental modeling can be done! once the rigging is done...

...Character UVs can be unwrapped - we will still be able to animate while this and all texture related things are in progress as we will be creating animation clips in the trax editor which can be later applied to the rigged and textured characters!

One problem left to be solved is rendering. When rendering with mental ray, the displacement of the normal maps looks more blurred than it does in the viewpoint with high quality rendering enabled. The viewpoint rendering give the best representation of what the model would look like in a game engine and i think it looks better than when rendered with mental ray due to the blurriness issue.

zombie walk practise

inspiration: Metal Slug 3




Test:

normal map test and junk

We will be making low poly and high poly versions of our models and then baking normal maps using Maya's transfer maps functions.

In this test I have a low poly cube of only 6 faces and a displaced high poly with 6144 faces.

the low poly is on the right and the high on the left.


I then used the high poly to bake an occlusion map which could then be used as a template and base for the colour texture map.

Baked occlusion map:


texture from occlusion applied to low poly cube:

Non-linear animation using the trax editor

I animated an idle animation, walk-cycle, run-cycle and the motion of getting an gun out of its holster. I then sequenced them in the trax editor and created bleding animations between each one. The gun animation was layered on top of the run animation so that the lower half of the body is running and the upper body is doing the gun animation.

New project and that

So we have started a new project for which we have written our own brief. Its basically going to be a concept for a video game. It will still be rendered out as a movie sequence but we are going to build the assets and animate to game engine restrictions.

I will be doing the animating which means that i will have to animate using animation clips and layered animation. In Maya this can be achieved using the trax editor.