Road Spirit

The road spirit is done just need to add in the environment and finish my final sketch on the river spirit.  I still working out how to use illustrator but I think the road spirit turned out fine.

MDDN243

The rat idea was not well received which, mirrors the feeling that I have had for awhile.  It does not seem to be a spiritual enough to represent the ideas that I want to put across.   With the help of Ben, we came to the idea of giving the contrast between the man made world (the road spirit), and the natural world (river spirits).  I want to show that the man made world is part of nature and deserves the same respect and care that rivers get, such as not littering.  This means taking my lizard idea further.  It also means having to design another character to represent the river.  Right now I feel as if the river spirit would be more gecko like and be a lot larger than the road spirit as it is older and more respected among people.

Edit: I decided that the river spirit should be more tuatara like and the road spirit should be more gecko like as the gecko is the younger species just as the road spirit is.

First digital sketch

This is one of my first attempts at drawing in flash so it does not look as good as I think it should.  I will probably redraw it later today.  I don't really like the colour of the fur/grass, I think I will make it spikier and a lighter, browner green.

Blocking part 1

Have done the first lot of blocking for the animation, mostly to do with the waking of the robot after it has recharged.  Have noticed a few things that are annoying about the rig, but most of the problems turned out to be from me setting keys on the wrong control groups(such as the one the controls the orientation of the finger controls).  I believe I can have most of the blocking done by at latest Tuesday hopefully giving me enough time to clean up before Friday.  Still need to make the meshes for the environment have done some but have not put them together yet and figured out their orientation in the scene hopefully will have this done by Tuesday as well.

Strike a Pose

Here is what I achieved today.  I finished the rig and now my robot can move.  Only thing not done is the wheel but I will figure it out and do later in the week.

Almost rigged!

The character is almost rigged just the eyes and the eyebrows to go and some polishing on some of the controls to make them easier to use and select.

Learning rigging

The last few days I have been watching a lot of videos on rigging.  One site that I fund quite useful was Poly face.  It has an entire collection of videos on rigging characters for free.  The ones I found useful for this project where the hand and arm tutorials and the mech rig also gave me ideas on how to rig the arm of my character, though I have yet to do that and time is running short.  I plan to spend a good portion of the weekend at Te Aro rigging and starting blocking for the main shots of the animation.

Character Model

I have fixed up a few things on the model mostly to do with edge hardness.  Now that this is done I am going to look up some tutorials on piston IK to make the arms work as I want them to and also some tutorials on hand rigging.

Finalizing the Begining

I have finally reached a shape that I believe is good enough for the beginning shape of my animation.  This may change but for now this is what I will use.  This is defiantly not the texture I will be using, it just helped me when I started animating it with other objects.