Finished.

I have now finally finished my animation, with a slight change to some things:

- The storyboard has changed so that the slug still comes out of its cave (made by using a sphere and edited the verticies so it seemed more bumpy with an added material, then cloned and stacked on top/near each other), but instead of finding a flower and hitting it, it sees a log that rolled near his 'home' and disturbed him, so he goes out and bashes it, then goes back in wagging it's 'tail' as if to say he did a good job of beating it up!

- The arm issue; I have decided to leave the arms down when Slurggy moves/glides across the floor, as it looks much better and realistic, rather than him with his arms up looking like he is about to take off like an aeroplane!
I was hopeful in getting the arms to move by moving the verticies about, however this was also not possible as the slug's body would go completely out of shape and also disappears, meaning I could not click on anything (e.g. polygons, verticies etc) - therefore the arms were not able to move as a result. Because of this, it meant making him use the club was virtually impossible, so the idea was to just create an illusion the arms are moving whilst Slurggy is gliding so that the arms were not as noticeable (in knowing that they aren't actually moving).

The song I used was by James Blunt - 'You're Beautiful'. I felt this was quite humourous and suitable to use as it suggests Slurggy is beautiful, plus the opening lyrics goes 'my life is brilliant...' which I found quite amusing since his life is the complete opposite (his home is empty and there is not much going on in his life). If you look carefully it looks like he is saying the lyrics when he opens his mouth too.

Thoughts:

I am pleased at learning some new skills during this module; such as the FFD Modifier and morpher tools. It was fun creating a character which shows off its personality, though I think I could do better with his facial expressions, and especially with the arms.

Slurggy comes across as quite dumb and slow, yet grumpy and tough at the same time which is what I wanted to achieve. The use of his eyebrows and eyes moving creates the 'angry' expressions well in my opinion. The mouth staying open with buck tooth also creates the appearance of a goofy, slow slug.

If I were to do this again however, I wouldn't use the PathDeform modifier to create the slugs body as this causes many problems, and could be the reason why the bones for the arms didn't work. I would just make the shape by playing around with the polygons/verticies manually as this doesn't look too difficult to produce.

Overall, I felt I have met the brief to create a character which children can relate to and will grow to love and idolise in some way or another.

Arm Problem!

I have been trying to bone and animate the arms but there seems to be a huge problem with the envelopes that can't seem to be fixed. As you can see from the image and video below, creating the bones and placing them in the arms is fine and it all moves correctly when animating.

However, the envelopes stop working properly after saving and then opening the file up again. The Slug's body goes completely wrong and out of shape very badly!

This is a real shame as I was planning to have the arms move about when he is gliding along the floor, as well as the arms having a vital role in picking up a club and smashing something with it.
I am determined to make the arms do something at least and will have to find another way if possible to achieve this!

Facial Hair!

Originally I had planned to use the Hair & Fur Modifier to apply onto Slurggy for facial hair and hairiness in general. However, it seems that this is a very complicated tool to use as I had to sit for hours combing it all in the right direction, and it was VERY slow in loading even each individual hair on my computer, so I decided against using it.

This doesn't mean to say that Slurggy doesn't have facial hair though, as I have simply extruded out polygons and added colour to it using the multi/sub object layers in the material editor to achieve this.

It is a shame that I couldn't use the hair tool in the end, however, I feel that this simpler way of creating cartoon like hair works more effectively - plus it's more efficient and doesn't affect the mouth when it's moving.

Leapard skin & animation testing

I have been experimenting with the clothing that Slurggy will wear and actually applying it to the polygons that have been extruded out, using the UVW Mapping Modifier and images I created myself in Photoshop.

I planned on reversing the typical caveman clothing colours to black with orange spots to make him more unique and different - however it just didn't look right so I changed to Orange with black spots. This worked better in my opinion and people will and should be more aware that it's a caveman slug.

With animating, I have added 6 bones into the body to enable it to move along. Initially, I had tested out animating the slug by using the PathDeform modifier spline, however, this created a lot of problems; such as the body shape being completely out of place and literally screwed up, it would not go back to how it should look for some reason, so I had stuck with bones.

To make Slurggy move along like a slug would, I had limited control of the front part, so focussed on the hip bone (Bone03_Hip). This at least made it look like it was using its muscle to push him along with the back parts of his body.

Clothing

The clothing for Slurggy has been added. This was done by extruding and insetting polygons on the body. Though it is simple, I think it has a good effect in portraying a typical caveman outfit. I will add material to it later using the multi-sub object layer and using UVW mapping modifier.

The arms have also been redone so they appear more meaty and so that the arms don't look like they have been smoothed out like the previous post showed.

Arms and monobrow

I have been working on the arms and monobrow lately, just playing around with what looks best, along with experimenting with the hair and fur modifier. With this modifier, I have found that it takes a long time to comb everything into place and takes a lot of patience with getting each hair in the correct position, but I think that even if some hairs are out of place, it would actually be quite fitting for a caveman as their appearance was quite 'rough' like.

Below just shows some examples of what I came up with.

I will definately be keeping the monobrow as I think it looks quite fitting with the cartoony style. I also created it so that it had a 'jagged' appearance by moving the vertices around. It should also be noted that the 'symmetry' modifier was used as well, and thanks to Paul, he showed me that animations won't be altered (as previously mentioned with what happened to the testing animation) if I 'collapse' it first - and this is what I did with the monobrow.

The arms were made by extruding polygons out of the body. I think they could be improved on, especially as it looks really flat at the moment and needs some muscles added to it. I also felt that Slurggy doesn't need any fingers as the end of the arms can be the hands/fingers instead - I think this looks more effective in my opinion too.

Finally, I DEFINATELY will not be keeping the hairyness on Slurggy as shown in the last picture!! I just thought it looked quite funny and would post it up. My final thing will probably just have some curtain hair on its head and some stubble on its face. The arms will have some hairs sticking out too.

Testing Animation

I have now fixed the eye problem that I had previously by cloning the left eye and making a new stalk for it. The bit where the stalks join to the head are not completely symmetrical as you can see different 'twists' where it has been joined, but this won't really matter as it's only minor and you probably won't notice it unless close up.

I have played around with the mouth and eyes a little bit to get a grasp of what facial expressions can be achieved. At the moment, he comes across as really dumb looking, (which is what I want fortunately!)

I also haven't added the FDD modifiers onto the eyes yet, but I am planning to use this modifier for easier morphing when I animate the real thing.

Below shows how the body is linked with the eyes, teeth and dummy.

I have also included a video below which shows a little clip of expressions. A skylight and the advanced lighting tool was used to achieve this kind of cartoony/plastic effect. It looks good to use but takes a long time to render, but I will see if I have enough time to leave it rendering overnight etc.

You can't really see the mouth moving outwards in this video though, so I will make this more obvious when it comes to the final thing.

My next task is to make arms and fingers, a club and the clothes. I will hopefully be using the hair/fur tool too to make him hairy and even more caveman like, as well as adding in the bones for Slurggy to actually move!