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!

Eyes and a Problem!

I have finally attached the eyes together. The eyes were made using the method for creating the eyes from the previous tutorial that was shown in a lecture, as I felt it would fit in well with the slug in terms of movement of the lids and eyeballs, compared to the eyes that were made from the slug tutorial itself.

Briefly going over the creation of the stalk and attaching the eyes to the body:

- The stalk was created by insetting 2 polygons from the bottom eyelid, and then extruding outwards.

- Attaching the stalk to the head was achieved by selecting the 2 bottom polygons of the stalk and then 1 polygon on the head, then simply attached by using the 'bridge' tool.

To create the other eyeball, I simply used the symmetry modifier and adjusted the settings e.g flip the eye, and below shows the appearance of Slurggy so far.

HOWEVER! I have noticed that when I moved the animation from the testing, the symmetry modifier was affecting the movement very badly!

I think this problem may be because I animated the slug before adding the symmetry modifier on, but I think I will just have to make the other eye from scratch. This won't be much of a problem though and shouldn't take too long, I will just have to make it look symmetrical as much as possible.

Testing Mouth Movement

I have now linked the teeth to a dummy. This was so that I could move the teeth together as a tester to see if the mouth would move with the teeth properly. The dummy is useful as it allows me to move the teeth without actually having to select both teeth objects separately in order to move them.

Below shows how the teeth were animated with the mouth. It was achieved by moving specific verticies and just moving up and down at a time. Also, when I do move the mouth to animate, it can only be done when the PathDeform modifier is off, othewise it will not record it animating.

Below shows a video of the mouth moving.

Slurggy's Goofy Teeth!

Creating Slurggy's teeth was done by using a chamferbox shape and then modified by scaling the relevant (mostly corners) vertices in order to resemble a tooth shape. That tooth was then cloned and rotated 180 degrees for the bottom.

I then had to select a specific part of all the edges of the inside of Slurggy's mouth, and clicked on the 'create shape from selection' button. This basically creates a new object which is the shape of the edges I had just selected from the mouth, and it means that the teeth will be aligned to that shape/line.

To do this, the 1st original tooth is selected, and 'space tool' is selected from the tools menu. This part is where it clones the original tooth and can make as many as I want. (Shown below)

As you can see below, my teeth positioning and number of them are different from the tutorial as I wanted a goofy look. I also added turbosmooth onto the body and teeth to see what it looked like, and it looks pretty good at the moment.

Also, I originally had planned for the teeth to be goofier by being longer, but realised that it could be a problem when it comes to animating as some parts of the teeth may go through the mouth, so I 'fixed' it by rotating the teeth so that it stuck out and would overlap the bottom lip when closed.

I will test the animating of the mouth in my next post to see if there are any problems with this.

Modelling Slurggy's Body And Mouth

I have begun modelling the basic shape of my slug following a tutorial I found online: http://www.escalight.com/tutorials/3dsmax-tutorials/modeling-a-snail-part-1.html. When finished modelling the basics, I will be tweaking various parts of it such as including hair, caveman clothing, different eyes and teeth, as well as the animation being done freely etc.

Below shows my processes:

The first image shows that the slug's body was created with just a simple capsule shape.

The creation of the mouth was achieved by using the cut tool (cutting out parts of the capsule to gain that mouth shape by selecting the relevant vertices), and then welding the vertices together. Once that had been done, I had to select all the polygons inside that shape, and clicked on the 'inset' button several times so that I would get several outlines of the mouth going inwards. The very middle part of the mouth was then deleted, and the outer mouth outlines were scaled to size so that it wasn't so big. Finally, the middle polygons of the mouth were extruded and beveled out to create the lips. The hollow part of the mouth were done by selecting relevant edges and then moved inwards a few times. To close the mouth I clicked on the 'cap' button on the borders around the hole.

The 2nd image just shows that I had to stretch out the shape of the slug's body so that it was longer and smoother looking using the 'soft selection' tool. I also made him quite chubby!

This 3rd part shows how I made the shape of the slug to be 'slug like' using the line tool and 'PathDeform' Modifier. This part took quite a lot of time to perfect and took several attempts to get it right! Basically the line acts as a bone for the slug's body shape and copies the shape of the line - drawing the line is quite tricky! I also had to play around with the parameters settings, changing the percent to achieve the look. After playing around with this I still wasn't too happy with the shape, so kept re-drawing the line, but only to realise a few hours later (yes!) that I could also move the line around to get a better shaped line (was much easier than having to re-draw everytime, saved time too!).

Storyboard - The Stupid Slug...

I have now come up with a brief storyline for the slug caveman. His name will be Slurggy, just because it suits his appearance and sounds quite 'dumb'. :)

The idea is that the viewer will see the cave first, expecting something big to appear, however all you will see is a small slug coming out instead! He goes off to search for food (at least that is what the viewers should be thinking), but he's actually gone out to find a flower for his home. When he eventually drags the flower back, he realises its dead with literally no petals left from all that dragging!

This story will give me lots of room to mess about with his facial expressions, as he can be seen as being very excited and happy when he finds a flower, or when he is bashing the flower to 'cut' it, he can be seen as stupid and dumb. Then when he goes back home and realises the flower is dead, he will have a surprised and angry face on him.

New Character Development

Here are my new sketches for my slug caveman. I am quite keen on the one with the monobrow and think will stick with that look for when I model!

A different Idea....

After another long think, I have decided to change my caveman idea quite drastically (well, appearance wise)!

Instead of creating a human caveman, I have decided to change it so that it is an animal. This was because I felt that kids relate to a character more when it is an animal, especially judging by how many animated films there are at the moment that uses animals for characters, which are adored by kids. Human characters on the other hand, I feel kids still appreciate, but not so much when you compare to an animal character.

So, for my character I have chosen to pick an animal that can be seen as 'gross' and most likely an animal which doesn't have the 'aww factor' when you first hear what it is. That animal, is a slug. I felt that a slug would be ideal as it is a slow moving animal, in which case I could make it quite dopey in relation to a caveman's knowledge too.

I will be putting some of the ideas from the earlier drawings of the cavemen I drew into the slug's look too! These will be posted up later.

Eye Rigging

In this lecture, we learnt how to rig movements for eyes. The tutorial for this was found from this site: http://www.comet-cartoons.com/3ddocs/eyerigging/

It taught me how to use FFD Spacewarp modifier, as well as the morph modifier also. The morph modifier I found to be extremely useful as it meant I could rig the eyelids easily without having the risk of the eyes messing up if moved on the actual object. With using the morpher modifier, it basically assigns whatever shape/expression FFD you create to the original eyeball. So when you keyframe the movement, it follows the targets to the shape/FFD, depending on how high you move the number up.

Below shows my testing, showing the different expressions created as well as having the actual eyeballs and eyelids moving by rotating each part individually.

I have to say, I am pleased with the outcome of this and am definitely going to use this technique for my character as it is perfect for a cartoon format. Plus, it was quite easy to do so that is always a bonus! I haven't attached to a head for testing yet but will try this out once I have started modelling my character.

Rigging Leg Testing

In this lecture, we had to learn how to rig leg movements using IK solvers on bones, and animate them to do a simple walk. The tutorial we followed was from www.free3dtutorials.com/modeling/3d-max/walk-cycle-part-1.php.

I found this method of leg movements to be extremely fiddly - I had several problems with the dummies not working after being linked, and sometimes once they are linked, the other bones just randomly detached itself, meaning I could only move the bones using the blue crosses that shows up. I also had to make sure that when I am linking dummies to bones, it had to be from the bones to the dummy, otherwise linking from the dummy to the bones doesn't work. Very frustrating when moving the blue crosses also because I found it difficult to tell which cross belonged to which foot/heel etc.

A video of my attempt is shown below - it was very tricky to do and looks dodgy in certain places, so it could be improved on in terms of accuracy of bends etc. On the whole I think it's OK for a first attempt...

Character Design Ideas

After much thought (and debate!), I have now decided to create a caveman for my character. The appearance that I am aiming for is to create it in a cartoony style, a style I'm sure that most kids will love and appreciate, seeing as there are so many children's 3D films around that has at least 1 character a kid idolises.

I have drawn a couple of character ideas shown below, each with different types of personalities - though when it comes to actually creating the character in 3DS Max, I may want to switch some persona's around depending on how the caveman looks.

At the moment, I like the 1st caveman more and so do most other people, so I may stick to that appearance. He does look a bit like Fred Flintstone though which I'm trying to steer away from, so might change the cloth outfit a bit or add longer hair and a beard, but keeping the friendly giant look along with it.

Mood Boards - Cavemen & Vikings

I have been thinking about what ancient civilisation to choose from for the past week and have narrowed it down to either Vikings or Cavemen. I still can't decide which one of these to do, so have created two mood boards for both of these.

Vikings

Cavemen

At the moment I am leaning towards creating a cavemen, as the character I have in mind for it will be in a cartoony style. His personality will be quite goofy, yet he will be big and loveable - a personality I'm sure most kids will like. Though I'm still unsure as there isn't much to be created for a caveman (clothes wise), and if I were to create a caveman, I would like to add fur to it in 3DS Max, however the loading time of it is putting me off the idea too!

As for the viking, I think this could be more suitable to create as there's more accessories and different clothing that can be made compared to the caveman, but I'm finding it difficult to imagine a viking which can be seen as iconic to kids for some reason, but I will see...

Mood Board of Ancient Civilisations

I have gathered several different images together and put into a mood board; these shows the different types of Ancient Civilisations that I could use and base on for my character. I have tried to find images that portrays different personalities through the types of clothing they wear as well as background cultures/ways of life etc.

The images includes the periods of Cowboys, Red Indians, Romans, Vikings, Egyptians, Victorians, Cavemen Era, Knights (Medieval) and Acient Greece and Chinese.

Favourite Animated Character

I have several favourite animated characters that come to mind. But rounding down to two, it would be the following:

The first one is a character called 'Dory'. from the film 'Finding Nemo'. The first obvious reason why she is one of my favourites is because I have a love for fish (pets)! I find them to be interesting animals - no matter what people say, they DO have individual personalities! In this case, Dory has a very funny side to her. She suffers from short term memory loss and therefore her character forgets everything extremely quickly! It makes her quite dumb to say the least, and is why she is such a loveable character! Her voice is also high pitched, and matches her personality quite well; this makes her outgoing and wild at the same time.

The second one is a character called 'Hammy', from the film 'Over the Hedge'. Reasons why I chose Hammy is because he has a clear loving side to him. He is just portrayed as very sweet and is made out to be sort of a push over, which leads him to doing stupid things (such as drinking a can of fizzy drink, and he goes VERY HYPER from this!). Very funny and cute.

First Thoughts

My very first thoughts of this module is simply "OH DEAR!"

The brief is on producing a character based on an ancient civilisation, which could become iconic and loved by children, and become someone that children can identify with.

Whilst the brief sounds fun to do and is on an interesting topic, I feel and know that I will struggle greatly as animation is a weakness of mine, and I am not very confident with animating at all. Although once I get into the swing of things I will hopefully get to grips with it all.

That aside, it will be a good challenge and I hope to create a suitable character for this module. It will be fun experimenting with the different facial expressions and capturing the body movements too.