Up North Summer 2009!

I'm going to be posting images from my trip up north with my family. There's a lot I want to show you, so keep checking the blog as I update!

Look at that clear Lake Huron water!

GAL rigging

The main character of GAL was originally one piece, as you can see with earlier posts. When I got to the weight mapping stage, however, I ran into some problems. Pictured below is a black hole sucking up all the geometry.

The team decided we should just use a rigid body character to minimize the pain caused by weight mapping. So, I cut up the geometry of the character and sewed in some end caps. There's still some soft body rigging, but as you can see below, the major limbs are separate pieces.

Notice the odd bones attached where the femur connects to the hip? Those are there to help deform the character's cloth garment.

Below is the same image as above, but with the bones hidden. The curves are all the controls I made for animating. I prefer forward kinematics for the arms and inverse kinematics for the legs.

That's probably the last you'll see of GAL for awhile. Our team members, including myself, are all attending school right now. I actually plan on remodeling the main character so that I can get better flow and paint the weight maps properly. I've watched a few tutorials and I think I can minimize weight mapping pains for the future. This was the first character I ever seriously had to weight map.

A New Year!

It's been two weeks since the start of my junior year at CCS. I've gotten a better taste of my classes, and things are going to start moving fast! I'm a little scared, but mostly excited for the year to come. I welcome you to my world!

-Shawn