Bipeds

In some of the scenes for my animation I want my character to walk. The best and most effective way to achieve this was to use the Biped technique.
Under systems I selected Biped and created the skeleton Biped system. I selected the motion tab and with Figure mode turned on I could scale and fit the skeleton into the characters body. I then switched Figure mode off to finalise the skeleton .

The biped is now in place and the next stage is to attach the mesh to the skeleton. I started off by selecting each body part in turn and applying the Physique modifier, then within the modifier I clicked the small figure which allows me to 'pick' which part of the biped to the selected body part. For each body part you apply the Physique modifier to, you always attach it to the BiP01 which is the parent of all the biped bones. this selection always attaches the right bone to the right body part.

Once all the bipeds have been initialized with the body parts the limbs will now move more or less like a real body limb should move. However in some cases when parts of the body move, some stray vertices will be left behind, this is because the physique modifier's envelopes haven't completely covered all the vertices and is fixed by selecting envelopes under the physique modifier's stack and using the scale tool to make the envelopes bigger to cover all the vertices.

Now with the biped system finished I can make the character walk. Under the Biped parameter within the motion tab I clicked on the footsteps mode. Inside the Footstep creation panel I selected Create multiple footsteps and 'walk'. This box allowed me to select everything from how many footsteps to the length of stride and pace of the characters walk.

After several different attempts I was settled on the render below. The character has a slight limp which I think suits his eccentric personality. I also quite liked the effect of the characters robe shifting along the shoulders.

Storyboards

Whilst creating my character I was also thinking about what sort of scene the character would be used in. I drew out some storyboards of the camera shots and basic movements I wanted within the scene. Furthermore there will be close up shots of the characters face which will portray the expressions.

Along with the storyboard images I have also included some 3DS MAX rendered images of the environment used within the storyboards.

Character enters.

Character cannot get his light saber to work, so becomes angry. Eventually it works and he is happy.

Character continues to walk on.

Character bumps into another man and becomes angry and points at other man.

Character throws his light saber at the other man. The man screams and will have a close up shot of terror.

Character walks off out of room leaving the man behind.

Below are rendered images of the environment and light saber which will be used.

Character Update & Profile

With the additions and updated details of the character I thought it would be an ideal time to provide a work in progress. The next stages of the character will be to fill the rest of the body with bones so his arms can move and also to get the character walking using the biped technique.

In the image below, the characters sleeve has been updated and also the characters fingers are fully functioning with bones.

This image shows the characters new eyes, they do look slightly larger than they should, however I think it will be ideal to have them this size as the characters expressions will be slightly more dramatic and easier to see.

The image below shows the whole character thus far.

Along with the model, the character should also be given a name and a personality to make the character appear more realistic and have a background.


Name: Mickey ‘El Loco Candyhips’ Funshine.
Age: 38.
Height: 6'4.
Parents/Lineage: Jeevan and Francois Funshine.
Occupation: Space Cowboy / Connect 4 Extraordinaire.
Interests/Hobbies: Lewd Behaviour, Thrash Punk, 5-a-side Football and Alcoholism.
Dislikes: Tuna and games of ‘Twister’.
Favourite Food: ‘Italian B.M.T’ Thursday’s ‘Sub-of-the-day’.
Favourite Drink: ‘The Cheeky Vimto’ Which is thought to be a cocktail of harmful and illegal liquid substances.
Place Of Birth: Mickey is thought to of materialised in a wheelie bin outside Francois’s nans house.
Fun Fact: Is believed to have created the popular 80’s ‘Nu-Wave’ movement after a hosting a disco in his parents house. 

Short Bio:
Plays ‘Midfield General’ in his 5-a-side football team ‘The Dreaded Rear Admiral FC’. His football skills are thought to be the origin for the term “Crushing Disappointment”.
Became incredibly angry after losing the rights to his hit number 1 singles  “Tonight, Im Gonna Rock You Tonight” and “Gimmie Some Money” in a game of ‘Pop-up Pirate’.
Mickey now spends his time searching the universe in his 2 door 'Star Destroyer' saloon finding the inspiration and funding to write his debut Irish folk album. Will stop at nothing to reach this goal.

The Eyes

Making the eyes is quite a simple and straightforward task and can add a lot of depth and personality to the character.

I start off by creating a sphere, naming it ‘Iris’ and changing the colour to white. By cloning this sphere and decreasing the Hemisphere we can create a lens shaped object. I changed the colour to black and named it ‘Pupil’. I then reduced the radius to form a good sized pupil.

The next step is to create the skin which will form the eyelids. Again we start by cloning the first sphere and reducing the hemisphere to create a sphere cut in half. I increased the radius slightly and rotated it into place to form an eyelid. Also I changed the objects colour to skin coloured. I then cloned the first eyelid and placed it on the opposite side under the eye.

The model of the eye is now finished but the next step will allow us to manipulate the vertices of the eye to form expressions. Under the ‘Space Warps’ panel I selected ‘Geometric/Deformable’ objects from the drop down menu. Within this menu I can select ‘FFD(Box)’. I dragged this box out to cover the eye with the number of points set to 2x2x2.

With all the eye objects selected I use the bind to space warp selection to connect the eye to the FFD(Box).

Now under the FFD(Box) modifier list I can select ‘Control Points’ to pick points of the box to move which will move the vertices of the eye object.

Below is a short video example of the FFD(Box) controlling a pair of eyes.

Another important way to control the eyes is to use helper points. Using helper points we can set up the pupils to follow the points which can be useful when you’d like your characters eyes to follow something.

Under the Create panel I selected the helper objects and chose Point. I placed the point helper on the stage in front of the eye, this will be the object that the pupil will follow.

With a pupil selected I went to the motion control and within the assign controller parameter I clicked the Rotation: Euler and then clicked the small ‘?’ box to bring up a list of controllers. I picked the ‘LookAt Constraint’.

Further down the assign controller parameters the ‘LookAt Constraint’ becomes available and will now allow us to select LookAt Target to pick the helper object. The pupil will now follow the helper object when it moves. However be sure that the Select LookAt Axis is set to the right axis, in this case it’s the Z axis.

Below is a short video of a pair of eyes moving with the help of two separate helper objects.

Research On Emotion

The main purpose of the character is to portray some kind of emotion either in body, facial expression or both. Before I can start to animate my character I need to gather some basis of research that I can examine and model my character on. I will be trying to animate my character to perform angry and malicious expressions so I searched for videos that could help with those emotions.

I chose this video because there is a good collection of general negative expressions, lots of frowning and stern faces. Furthermore the main character is a tortured soul who seems permanently furious and although when he seems happy it still looks like a manic grin rather than actual happiness. The full length film it self provides a huge amount of emotional responses, much more so than any other film due to it being a musical and therefore the actors need to portray a much more dramatic persona


I chose these videos because the main character in the film is a deeply insane and an evil maniac that provides really eccentric and powerfully emotional persona.





Below is a couple still images which I thought relevant to the emotional expression research.

Skinning & Boning The Hand

This week was dedicated to creating bones to put inside the hand which will allow for realistic hand/finger movement when animating the character.

The first step is to create ‘helper’ objects which the bones will be ‘linked’ to so that when a helper object is rotated the bones rotate with it. Under the create > helper menu the correct tool to use is ‘Point’. I placed a separate helper point in front of each finger and he thumb.

The next stage was to create the bones. Under the create > systems menu I chose the ‘bones’ tool and drew out five bones, one acting as the bone inside the palm and the rest for the finger itself. It may be necessary to resize/scale some of the bones to get the right shape inside the hand.

When the bones are ready in the correct places inside the hand I now had to link each bone to the correct helper object. For example each bone along the forefinger will be linked to the helper object positioned at the tip of the forefinger.

I select a each bone in turn and right click and choose ‘wire parameters’ then from the drop down menu I select ‘transform’ then ‘rotation’ then ‘Y rotation’ because I want the fingers to move up and down like they should.

I then click the helper object to begin the link, going through a similar drop down menu box, choosing the same Y rotation selection.

A box appears where I click the middle button and then down to ‘connect’ this completes the link between the two.

Once each bone has gone through this method the helper objects can then be used to rotate the fingers. Furthermore the thumb was also added to the Z axis to allow it to move on its two axis.

The next stage is to link all the bones in the hand to the hand itself so I can move my hand object with the bones.

With the hand object selected I applied the ‘Skin’ modifier and added all the bones in the hand to the modifier. Now that everything is connected the helper objects will now be able to move each of the fingers, however in most cases the skin modifier applies a much too strong pull on all the vertices all around which leads to a messy looking hand object. To fix this I went inside the skin parameters to edit envelopes.

Also within the weight properties there is an ‘Abs. Effect’ which ranges from 0 to 1 and dictates the strength of the vertex select. So by turning down vertices that should be moving to 0 it is easy to clean up the envelopes to animate a realistic looking hand.

I reapplied the ‘Turbosmooth’ modifier to the hand object to give it the realistic appearance and then tested some simple hand movements on the animation timeline to get used to how it worked.

Below is a video of the characters hand.

Arms & Hands

Following on from the legs and chest areas of the body, I will next be making the arms and hands.

For the arm I created a cylinder which I would use as a guide to get the right length. I created another cylinder and decreased the sides down to 8, with ‘smooth’ unchecked. It is a good idea to decreasing the height and width segments to help keep the polygon count low. The object is then converted to an editable polygon.

The cylinder is kept thin so we can extrude the object. Extruding three times to allow room for the shoulder, then extruding one long segment to create the bicep area, extruding a further three times to create the elbow socket then one final extrusion to create the lower arm.

To create a realistic looking bicep and forearm we select the polygons between the shoulder and elbow and delete them entirely. With the border selection turned on I can select the borders (the inner rings on both sides of the deleted object) and select ‘Bridge’ which joins the upper arm back together but this time with a information box that allows the user to input segments, taper and bios the polygons to create a much more realistic looking bicep.

The exact same method is used to create a more muscular looking forearm. Below is the arm with a ‘Turbosmooth’ modifier applied. The next step is to create the hand and join the two together.

The hand is a relatively shape to model realistically, but like most other complicated shapes, they start with a simple box object.

Staring with a box that will act as the palm and back of the hand I applied four length and three width segments which will allow me to create the fingers and the thumb out of the basic box.

After converting the box to an editable polygon, I used the polygon selection tool to highlight where I wanted the four fingers to extrude from. Using the bevel tool I made a slight inset into the hand object, this makes it easier to extrude the fingers individually.

Extruding the fingers is the simplest aspect of creating the hand. Before extruding the polygons it is best to rotate each polygon slightly, this will give the fingers a more realistic appearance, compared to having four fingers pointing straight forward. Using the bevel tool to extrude and change the height to create the knuckle and extrude out the finger.

The thumb works with same technique, however is more complicated due to where it is on the hand and the general shape.

I Selected a polygon on the side of the hand and rotated it slightly so I can extrude the thumb towards the fingers rather than sideward’s.

The thumb was a problem area for my hand model, at first it wasn’t long enough and so in trying to get a good, realistic shape I created a few too many extruded polygons when it could have been kept much simpler.

I also had to rotate and move vertices when creating the thumb to make sure it went in the right direction and was to scale with the rest of the hand.

In the image below shows the thumb and also where I have selected the vertices on the side of the hand and pulled them down to create a rounded hand shape.

With the shape of the hand finished I spent a lot of time working with individual vertices and polygons to create a better and more organic shaped hand. Finally a ‘TurboSmooth’ modifier with ‘literations’ set to 2, gives the hand a much smoother and realistic surface.

The image above shows the design of the hand so far. The thumb still looks slightly odd and a bit thin but overall I am very happy with the model. I deliberately tried to make the fingers thin and spider like as I thought it will suit my character when brought together. Furthermore my character will be wearing gloves rather than bare hands so extra detail such as finger nails, is unnecessary. However detail in the textures will make the gloves obvious.