I said before that I was going to modify my old rig and use it in this project but I’ve changed my mind. I found some unstability in my first rig and modifying it would surely bring some new problems later on. So I came to the conclusion that it would be better to build a new rig from scratch.
I’m almost done with the new rig now. This rig has IK-FK controls for the legs, spine and tail with switches for each. It also have a low poly mesh split up in segments constrained to the appropriate driving joints for visualisation when animating.
We have been looking at a lot of stock footage to find something that would suit our needs for this project. We have found a few clips who we are interested in but they are quite expensive, going up to about $60 per second. And we need about 20 seconds… Well we are exploring our financial options and if we can find some kind of sponsorship for this.
Anyway we have downloaded a preview version of the clip we would like to use and tracked one of Olles zbrush sculpts into the shot. Just to see how that would turn out. In the final movie the dinosaur would break out from the forest onto the path and walk towards the camera. Now it looks like he is rollerskating trough the forest. That’s not the idea but you can see that the tracking is working perfectly and that the forest is really suited for dinosaurs.
You can watch it here:
Playblast
You can watch the stock footage we want on www.thoughtequity.com here:
http://www.thoughteq … /clip/1614288_127.do
Production pipeline testmovie: PigMouseBear_Production pipeline testmovie
We just finished our testmovie called “PigBearMouse”. We made it to try out all the steps in our production pipeline. It was made in 2 days.
Muscle tests was not done in this project. We are working on a separate test for muscles on Tomas rigg (as you can see in the post below)
Olle focused on:
- Sculpting and polypainting in zbrush
- Different ways to render displacement and normalmaps in maya
- Renderpass and compositing techniques
Tomas focused on:
- Skinning a model on an already animated rigg
- How to transfer skinweights
- Learning tracking in Boujou
Note: This was a test to try out techniques. Not to make it look good :)
A couple of months ago I rigged this t-rex skeleton I downloaded from www.highend3d.com. We have decided to modify my rig and use it in this project.
Today I have been reading up on muscle rigging in maya. I’m using the same rig to do my muscle rigging tests and this is what I have so far:
We have been working on our time- and project plan. Our time plan will probably change after our technique testing phase. It’s only then we will know the full extent of what techniques we will include in the final product.
The dinosaur will be the Gorgosaurus. It was related to the T-Rex so it will be similar but a bit smaller.
The first concept:
Here is the proposal for our project:
Proposal