Characters

Once i had experimented thoroughly and decided 3D was the way to go i had a discussion with an ex colleague on our easiest rigs, i realised standard primitives were just sitting there like the tea pot in the HDRI imaging project. I could simply have one fight the other off, their character design void, but their movements similar to a sack animation, popular in the Disney golden age and Don bluth studios.
The characters simple, saving me massive amounts of time modelling and even more rigging, however i will rig and move them appropriately so that they will be full of life and be perfect alternatives.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/d3/d6/80/d3d6802ba08920c752f179f32ea1aa80.jpg

This new character idea also pushed the ending development along, when i storyboarded this out, i now know how i can get away with a goreless ending, shocking but not blood smeared.



Because i may be back on track, time wise thanks to these shape characters, i think i could pursue the 3D work in Maya, a programme im vaguely familiar with but would like more portfolio work to show.

I modelled characters first as i always would have, they were  simply standard primitive shapes, beveled around corners converted from polys, smooth mesh, standard subdiv (subdivision levels)

This movements were really inspired by the Sack aniamtion projects as i said so the ball was hyper and bouncy, the sqaure jagged and slow, and the bigger sqaure similar but even slower and bigger, hopefully showing off personality?

Making the rigs wwas trickier than i remember when  i previously used maya, so i partially regretting using maya at this point, but once i had learned to group the clusters (similar to maxs vertexs if on smooth) progress wasnt as slow.
Used a simple lattice rig, when i applied a standard lattice deformer upped the ffd divisions to 6
disparced the envelope influence to 2 at the top 2 at the middle and 2 at the bottom to equal deformation,

(lattice point is essentially vertexes with smooth/soft selection/radial selection on at all times, it took alot of attempts for me to get it right unfortunately)

so by that i could select different sections i wanted to control independently, by selecting the lattice points and made a cluster.

essentially parenting the lattice points to the one point, i then created the controls, by using parent scale and oriente constraints
I went on and did this for each shape individually and thats my characters modeled and rigged and ready for animating. (at last)