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!