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.