Character Creation: Sky Diver

Ok, project’s over and site’s updated so I thought I’d do a write-up as promised in an earlier post. Those who know how to count might have guessed that this was the third big assignment given at 3D design and animation at Noroff 07/08. As such, we were once again to build on skills already acquired and character creation/animation were the natural progression.

Criteria for this project:

As you might have noticed, I chose a female sky diver for my project. She had to be a grounded one though, due to the criteria above. I went for a semi-realistic look and modeled the character from photo references. V-Ray was my render engine of choice. Early modeling:

I also made a carrot as a prop, to emphasize the fact that the character is a vegetarian. Although it’s almost too small to see in the final shots, I thought it turned out rather well:

I had a fair bit of trouble when it came to do the hair. I experimented with everything from mesh to Hair&Fur to VrayFur. All of which had their own advantages and disadvantages. In the end I stumbled upon a plugin called HairTrix which seemed to play fairly nicely with V-Ray:

A bit more detail modeling and texturing and the character was ready for rigging and skinning:

Due to too much experimentation in the beginning of the project, the fact that one of our four weeks was the easter holidays and because my first skinning attempt disappeared under mysterious circumstances, there was now very little time left. With three days to deadline there were still skinning for a second time, walk cycle, poses, rendering, DVD and presentation left to do. To say I was rushing things near the end is a little bit of an understatement. Still I finished on time after working through the last couple of nights.

Pose 1:

Pose 2:

In this pose the character is supposed to be inches from touchdown. It looks a bit weird though, as I didn’t have the time to create the chute itself.

Pose 3:

This was the last pose I did. I wanted the character to look skywards, but not entirely sure I pulled it off. Made only a few hours from deadline.

DVD:

Walk Cycle:

Due to some miscommunication between me and my teacher I got the impression that one cycle (every two steps) had to be made from 24 frames. This resulted in a rather faster walk than I would have liked. When I finally realized we could choose the cycle length ourselves, there wasn’t enough time left to fix the cycle and re-render. The character actually blinks in this cycle, but due to the size of the movie it’s rather hard to tell.

All in all, I’m quite happy with the result although in hindsight, there are certain things I wish I had done differently. If I had more time, these are the first things I would have improved on in no particular order: