Project done

On Friday 5th of Dec. we finished the whole project. Now everything is ready for Tuesdays presentation.

Tasks I have done for this project:
-Modelling of the character (there is only one character but many sets of clothes)
-biped & kinematics
-Animation (drummer)
-Clothes for character 1 & 2 (guitar player & drummer)
-Modelling of drum set
-Editing, cutting & sync

Editing

Finally we got clips ready, so now I can import them to FCP. The editing process was easy task, because I have used Final Cut so many times before. Basically the video starts with guitar solo followed by a drum section. At the end of the video we have keyboard and some text.

Camera, lights, action!

Today I made 28 different drum clips for the YMCA video. First I rendered 20 clips and after that I imported all clips to Final Cut Pro for editing. After few hours of editing I found couple of mistakes so I switched back to 3Ds to do some final adjustments. I listened the song about 50 times so I knew how the drums should play so it wasn't too difficult to make them sync with music.

The animation is quite simple. Pretty often I just copied&pasted the animated frames to make it look like a movie. Even tough animation is simple it does not matter because the clips are so short.

First animation

Now I have reached the point where is good to do some testing with animation. My second character (drummer) is ready. He is basically same guy as guitar player, but t-shirt is bit different and he has also cap. All textures are also different form previous one. I built the character so that it is easy to modify because we are supposed to have 3 different musicians (guitar player, keyboard player and drummer). So basically when you want to change clothes you need to enter .PSD file and change the textures and nothing else.

So far animation looks ok, but I'm not 100% satisfied with movement. I guess I could adjust the envelopes to make it bit more smooth. This animation is only 50 frames long (about 2s) but it is duplicated so that you can see the movement more better. I didn't you any specific tricks by doing this animation, it's basic keyframe animation. Im still searching for some motion capture files to make the animation more realistic. I't is almost impossible to create flowing movement if you don't have option to use proper motion capture files. By using biped you can get pretty nice results, but still it is really difficult to replicate human movements.

Textures and animation2

Now I have completed textures for first character (guitar player). I used same techniques for the clothes as I used for texturing the head. UVW Unwrap modifier is really handy tool when you want to add proper textures for big surfaces like clothes. By using this modifier I can also edit the textures really easily just by opening Photoshop I can add more details or remove them. Im especially happy about jeans I made for this fellow. The jeans are actually Women's Jeans, but by doing some Photosopping I made them look like men's jeans.

I also tried to use wind modifier with t-shirt to make it more realistic. I managed to make it work, but I couldn't figure how prevent the t-shirt not to puncture/penetrate the skin. I guess there must be some solution for this problem, but couldn't figure it out.

Textures and animation

I have just finished building the character and combining it with biped. First I though that you are supposed to link character with biped, but soon I realised that it actually works, but it wont give any flexibility I need to make the character look realistic. After seeing couple of tutorials about skin modifier I learned how to link envelopes with biped. When using envelopes you should adjust the strength of each envelope really carefully to make the arms and legs bend as they should. This took me about 2 days to build, because I had to do it 3 times. First 2 times character was positioned in wrong place or the fingers were too close to each other.

This short animation was done by using motion capture files. Motion capture files contain information about biped movement and you can add them to you own modelling. This makes animation realistic but usually the clips are really short and difficult to find. I guess they are so expensive to make that you don't usually find those for free. In this modelling you can still see some problems with both wrists. If skin doesn't flow properly it is usually caused by too strong envelopes/badly adjusted envelopes.

Week 6

FINALLY the character is ready. I built the front part some weeks ago but I didn't finish whole modelling at that time. Actually this was much more easier than modelling the head, this is because there are not that many details in t-shirt or jeans. Modelling the hand was really slow process because fingers are so close to each other which makes it more complex. I modelled each finger separately to make it more detailed. First I tried to model all fingers from same plane, but it was almost impossible. Now I know pretty much everything I need to know about 3ds modelling to create what I want to. Of course there must be much easier ways to build 3d characters, but at the moment it is not important to study other techniques.