3D Character Maquette

As part of this unit I had to create a maquette of my 3D character.

The Clothes are different colour to my 3D modelled character character because my original idea had him wearing grey clothes, which would denote a plain appearance of a low level wizard. However when I modelled him in 3D grey seemed to plain and didn't stand out much so I changed it to blue so he would look more interesting and stand out more against the background.

Character Mesh - Geometry

The geometry for my characters mesh matches reasonably well with the topology sheet I created during pre-production. Just like in the design I created extra polygins on the joints as they deform more than the rest of the body and need to bend smoothly so it looks realistic. I think there are less polygons in general on the rest of my model which is good as it lowers the render time slightly when rendering images and video.

 

 

Character Design - Dynamic Pose

This is the dynamic pose for my 3d character.

Character Animation - Final Output

Here is my final character animation video fully animated.

Character Animation - Running

The final scene of my video is the comical ending where my character attempts to escape a large boulder which was accidentally summoned by his spell.

I am not happy with my characters run cycle in this scene as it is unrealistic and I will be changing it for the final video.

Character Animation - Spellcasting with effects

Here is my charcter animation so far but now I have added special effects to the spellcasting parts using the 'particle playground' effect in Adobe After effects.

Character Animation - Spellcasting

Here is my wizard casting his spell based on the body movement from the game Skyrim.

 



And bellow is the spell taking effect by the appearence of a magic circle.

Now that I have created these scenes I will be adding special effects to them in Adobe After effetcs to make the character and scene appear more magical and visually interesting.

Character Animation - Spellcasting Refference

As my 3d character is a wizard he will cast a spell in my video. For refference I looked at video's on youtube of the characters of Harry Potter casting spells with their wands, but I found these movements to be simple and not visually interesting, it was the special effects that gave their visual appeal. So afterward I looked at the master level spell casting body movement from Skyrim and found it much more visually interesting.

Character Animation Tests - Walk Cycle

My First animated scene. Animating something this simple was surprisingly difficult using the rig I had created as it isn't perfect but I am quite happy with this basic walk.

Finger Control

Possibly the most tedious task in rigging my character was animating the fingers to move/curl depending on the position of their controller.

To animate the fingers I used 'set driven keys' which program the bones to be in certain positions and/or rotation when the controller is rotated to different amounts.

Reverse footlock

It was advised to me that creating a 'reverse footlock system' skeleton rig in the feet so that the toes always point to the foot controllers.

It was very difficult to create separate from the rest of the skeleton and required multiple 'parenting constraints' to make it and the bones in the foot interact in a way that makes foot movement appear more realistic.

Joint Targets

To make sure my models joints point in the corrent direction, I have had to create 'targets' for them.

 

 

Now when I move the wrists and feet in a way that makes the knees and elbows bend they will point wherever I put the 'targets'.

Skeleton Rig Controllers

Here I have created controllers on and attached them to certain parts of the skeleton so that I can control the skeleton which will control the wizard from outside the body/mesh. I have put controllers on the wrist joints that control the rotation of the bone so the wrist can bend, they also control the position of the Ik chain handle that is in the wrist which will move the wrist and bend the arm.

Wizard Skeleton Rig

Here is the simple skeleton for my model. Ik chains have been attached in various places to create automatically bending joints so that I wonlt have to bend/place the joints myself e.g. the elbows and knees. To create this effect I put Ik chains from the shoulders to the wrists and from the hips to the ankles so that the elbows and knees will bend on their own.

 

Wizard  character Final Model renders. Flat (Top) and Smooth (Bottom).