Character Animation - Part 1

Ok, the one thing missing and now so obviously missing from the "ship in a bottle" project is people or rather sailors for my ship. So as I need some sailors and I need a break from modelling the ship I have set about building a generic character shape which I will make alterations to using ZBrush to generate the different members of the crew of my ship. I need these characters to move so I have rigged my generic model with a skeleton from Character Studio. I have loaded some mocap files that I download free from off the web - I know this goes against my desire to produce everything myself but I just do not have the time or money to build a motion capture studio and mocap movement is so much better than hand animated. In the end piece of video I plan to use Character Studios standard walk motion mocap files and mix in other mocap files downloaded from the web and then adding hand animated stuff done by myself to the mocap files. After all I doubt I would be lucky enough to find a load of mocap files specific for the movement of 18th Century Sailors so its the only way I could get this done other than spending a year hand animating each member of the crew. So here area few animted test videos showing the new generic character (now nick named Mr Pink) and you can see how mocap data adds so much to an animated scene.

I have added some crew to the next still image. Can you spot them?

After some thought, I may have a new project idea and maybe I will build my own mocap solution. I have found some mocap software online and downloaded a trial and trying it out now but really need a good bit of space to do my acting to camera stuff. Watch this space for updates on my progress.

Modelling, texturing and animation - Part 2

After a short break from my animation project to do some character modelling and a few days away from my CGI all together as I have been in interviews looking for full time CGI work and touting for more freelance CGI work (either will do), I am now back and ready to pick up where I left off.

Well after some thought I decided its time to build up some detail. I knew more detail and better textures would help sell this whole animation and make it look better and more realistic. So I have been back re-modelling the ship to build detail and improve the textures and here are my first renderings with the new details added.

This is a captains view from the ships wheel. Notice the nice plank work deck and the improved rigging but now I need to add little knots to the rope work rigging and improve the masts and booms.

Here are a few views of the ships new paintwork. I can see from these renders that I still have a lot of re-rigging to do and some of the textures need major tweeking.

Well now I am going to have to re-renderer everything for video but only after I get the ship 100% right. At least now I know exactly what I want, I can get everything planned and ready to render over the nights as I sleep.

Character Modelling

Here is a high polygon character head model based on myself (un-textured) that I modelled in 3DS Max and Zbrush.

Here is another character - I see this as a Judge or member of the house of Lords etc...

Here is a young afro woman character -

Young guy (mixed race) character -