I have taken some time to make a new topology.
Using my zbrush sculpt as a base I have made a new mesh on top of the old one. Later in Zbrush I can project all my old details back if I want to.
By using this workflow I can concentrate on form and gesture in Zbrush first. And then lay out my real topology after. More artistic freedom and better planned topology. I can even create my UV´s after I make my Zbrush sculpt if I want to.
Here is the new mesh I did. I kept it fairly light (helps when using muscle systems later on) and 99.9% quads. While making it I thought of the different muscle groups under the skin and tried to imagine it deforming. It think it will work great when i start using Zbrush for real. I might go back and work some more on this, but I’m calling it 90% done.
I did a paintover to easier show you some of the decisions i made when working on the model.
Here is my old basemesh. As you can see it would be useless in animation. But it’s great for blocking in form and proportions in Zbrush.
Now on to Uv’s and then Zbrush fun :)
I’ve taken the comments I’ve got into consideration and worked some more on my walkcycle. It is a bit slow, but dont have time to fix now =)
I’ve started to flesh out the dinosaur in Zbrush. For this I am using the same mesh I did for Tomas rig. Once Im satisfied with the main proportions I will make a more animation friendly mesh with better topology.
This is what I’ve got so far. The textured version is a paintover I did in photoshop. Just to get a feeling of what it might look like in the end.
The rig is now complete and I’ve started to do some animations.
This is a walkcycle I’m working on now. It just rough block pose to pose animation.
Click the image below
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:
