Four: Major Project Final Submossion

Making of Four (Version 2) by Mark Stamp on Scribd

Four Interim Presentation by Mark Stamp on Scribd

Four: Final Animation from Mark Stamp on Vimeo.

Four: Juvenile Geometry Nearly Complete

  I neglected to upload yesterday but here is what I was working on Tuesday. I was working to refine the model, finishing some of the chubbiness of the juvenile's body and fixing the UV maps.

  Getting the 'stubbiness' of the juvenile's front fingers was a little more difficult as they are a little longer due to the extra bone in each finger compared to the toes.

  Yesterday was also used as a time to fix the mouth. This turned out to be a little more difficult that I first assumed as her more juvenile form mouth opens with a vertical mouthline. With the current head this was difficult but not as difficult as it could be as it was meant to be in a transition phase anyway. As Four gets older her mouth gets more normal-shaped.

  A modified mouth cavity however will mean the gums will need to be modified to fit the mouth. To fit the idea that these teeth are for a more childlike creature I may have to stub them or sink them into the gumline. I was partially inspired by canid mouths so the easiest solution will be a matter of researching how the tooth sets of puppies and kittens look. Or I go back to otters as they manage a certain cuteness with their teeth despite having enlarged canines like dogs do.

  As well as adjusting the gumline, some work still needs to be done on the UV maps. I've made a start with the larger areas and most are ready for receiving their mirrored versions already.

Four: Starting the Juvenile Form

  I made a start on the juvenile form today, as a start to the next tasks in preparing my animation.

  To save a lot of time and to keep it looking like it could mature into its adult state, Four's juvenile form used the adult as a template, preserving (mostly) UVs, foundation geometry and the shaders used to make her believable. SOme UVs will need fixing and remapping, as I had to break a couple of them to save on gemonetry.

  The posiive is that I feel like she's coming out better in this form now that I know better what I'm doing. There is still some work to do before moving on to installing the skeleton. I need to make sure her eyelids conform to her eyeballs, correct the base of her tail, neotinise her front fingers to they look more childlike and maybe give her a bit of pudge in her belly 

  The body of her juvenile form is very loose. Some gemoetry was adjusted to look like fat that would disappear as she got older and more mature The eyes and claws I can rather straightforwardly import from the completed model and resize where appropriate.

Four: Updated Turnaround

With her shaders improved I decided to roll out a new turnaround. As well as showcasing her new skin this turnaround also attempts to better portray her personality though posing.

Four: Retouched Skin

  After being briefed for the second term, I figured I would try and add some finishing touches to Four to close off the minor project. The shader above uses a mila material to provide sub-surface scattering, but it appears to have an added benefit that the light interacts with her body much better than in the last design.

I also retouched her skin to give it more life, as before she was rather pale and dead when a direct transfer of the textures from a blinn to a mila shader was involved. It also gave me an opportunity to retouch her complexion to bring it more in line with her final concept.

Four: Model Turnaround

I was intending to upload this earlier in the day, however work on the documentation for the project project submission meant that I had to put this aside for a little bit. At least I managed to get it uploaded sometime today.

Four: Minor Project Submission

Four - Making Of by Mark Stamp on Scribd

Four: A Near-Final Model

  Today has been spent applying the finishing touches to Four's body. Using a texture sphere I transferred the texture I was working on to the main model and apart from what looks like an ambient occlusion anomaly under her belly, she's come out looking really nice. 

  I might modify the tinge of her tongue to add a bit of blue or orange. A way of giving it that alien vibe. Another factor is the tongue needs to be wet, It needs to glisten which could be done with a specular map as it shares its shader with the body..

  There does appear to be a shadow under her eye when the cornea is included in the render. It could be it's reflecting the world, which is pitch-black as there is a 40% reflectivity value. If so, it might be gone when Four is put into an environment with more than directional lights.

Four: Body Progress and Rendering Wizardry

  I have come to conclude that Four's adult form is almost complete. I might have sacrificed the time on the environment to make her work but I feel the sacrifice has some merit to it.

  I continued working on the textures and decided that because Four is fairly small (ish, perhaps the size of a large dog), her skin folds could be easily seen. I have had some setback as on the university PC I was using, the while PC would drop to five frames a second while extracting the occlusion map. What complicated doing it at home was the file couldn't be read, perhaps due to the way I had moved it while I packed up to leave. So I will try and get that first thing in the morning, as the ambient occlusion is crucial to giving something for the normal map to work on.

  The normal map itself came out a lot better after going over the Mudbox model using a stylus and a couple of sculpting layers to separate the detail. In particular what was improved were the folds in the neck and the hips, and the texture of the fins.

  Two of my favourite creatures from Potter spin-off film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them were Frank the Thunderbird and the Occamy (the other features were each cool in their own ways). Watching the film I was particularly interested in their eyes. Scenes with Frank showed the way his eyes would twitch about while his pupils would adjust themselves to focus his vision and adapt to minute changes in the light, while the Occamy despite having enormous irises retained their curvature. Both creatures also have irises that occupy the near-entirety of the eyeball, something I tried with Colo Colo last year but because I didn't quite know how to pull off refraction the eye looked sliced off on the front.

Frank (left) and the Occamy (right) with the most prominent things in focus - their eyes. ((c) Warner Bros. Pictures).

  This got me inspired to add similar features to Four's eye. I discussed with Alan about a variable twitch to the pupil dilation that was ultimately discarded in favour of manual control as Four's eyes are small enough that extreme close-ups would be the only way to see micro-dilations. 

  The addition of curvature was quite straightforward and gives the eye more of a feel that it is a full orb, rather than being sliced off on the very front. Part of the eyeball cuts into the eyelid, which under normal circumstances would accentuate that the iris is flat. But using refraction the cornea appears to completely hide this little detail.

  Most importantly, the eye looks like a sphere again even if viewed in a way that would expose the flatness of the iris for all to see. In the days before I had been mentally questioning how to reflect the inside but refraction is so much less complex. They still need a texture to actually look like eyes and maybe a bit more gloss but that's a very quick job.

Four: Skin and Colour

  With the model's rig just about ready I moved on to working out the textures. When making the normal map I found that the some regions were divided by seams. These seams were blended over in Mudbox, a technique I also plan to use to clean up the divides between the texture meshes, giving much cleaner result that's faster than trying to fix the seams in Photoshop.

However the normal map appears to be a little faint, but it is there and on more extreme areas such as the throat, it is visible. I am considering going back into Mudbox to bring the shapes out it might just be I need some more time working out what could be defined by its shape and what would be defined by patterns. The possibility exists of also using a displacement map so any minor changes to the geometry do not require restructuring the corrective poses.

  With the above picture I tried combining a greyscale of the normal map with the texture map to bring out the features. I consider it a bit of a mixed success though, as it has also ended up making poor Four look like she has severe sunburn. Beyond that, some greenish tint to coincide with her environment and some wrinkles and she's almost good to go skinwise.

Don't mind her lack of eyes. For efficiency's sake I decided to create the texture map on a copy of Four's geometry that matches the geometry on the rigged model. All the eyes really need are a texture map with the pupil stretched across the top edge of the image file.

The teeth and claws could easily be a shader at this stage. I just need to revise how to give the transparency of the edges. The idea that I believe will work is to give a mock rim highlight. The texture files are so far somewhat large - 8192 pixels square which I will likely keep for extreme closeup shots. Smaller files can be easily created for more distant or full-body shots.

  In fact I will probably need to do this, such size extends to the normal and specular maps which will eat processing power during rendering. Understanding my shots will be important in working out the correct resolution required. the current size might be too large for what I'm doing save for extreme closeups.

Four: New Year Work Begins

  I've been slow to update but I'm pressing on. The last couple of nights I had been working to catch up and I often finished with a trip straight to bed. Among the blends I have created I have sets for the knuckles, the wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck, collar, hips, knees and the ankles.

  The key issue I had been encountering was the rear had unexpectedly warped. But after a number of workarounds as at the stage I discovered the problem the arms and the neck were done but weren't causing the problem, so I wasn't too keen on rebuilding those. The workarounds seem okay, and some artefacts from the masking could be hidden by the textures to come. It did have the unexpected positive side effect of adding minor muscle twitches in the thigh when the lower legs are moving. 

To stop the blended shapes form exploding horribly if moved too far, each of the joints attached to an interpolator have a movement limit based on the values for their end-poses. it doesn't stop all horrible breaking but ensures especially with an IK that if a section the limb moves beyond the interpolation marker it doesn't violently mangle or implode the geometry.

  one of my mistakes in building the blends was I hastily disconnected all the controls. So I have to reestablish those. Fortunately the fins, perhaps the most time-consuming, only took an hour to rig. In rigging I also have an aim constraint attached to the eyes, which allows for more easy movement with the central control than the previous system of linking together the rotation attributes.

Most of the nodes have been reconnected. All that remains to link up are the fingers, toes, and the head tendrils, I've updated Mudbox so a normal map to give texture should be in the works tomorrow.

Four: Corrective Blendshaping

  I've been quiet but that doesn't mean I have not been busy. Although a long couple of months did put me mostly out of commission for a day or two.

The transformation of the throat works a fair bit better now. Looks a little more convincing and I find it cool that you can see some of the muscle in action.

  At the moment I have a very slight problem that when adding a twist to the wrist, the value would set itself to a value greater than or less than 1 and it would hideously deform to look like the wrist was grotesquely swollen.

  The arrangement I have so far is the best I can do with the current wrist despite attempts like clearing any influences around the joint before working the vertices. Though oddly this is the only problem site so far as there was no problem working the twist into the shoulder.

Four: Solidity for the Throat

  Today, as well as attaching all the joints to a control, I started adding corrective blend shapes. The first thing to correct was the throat. As unaltered the throat has a nasty habit of caving in on itself despite my best efforts with goal weights.

  Originally it was found that the transformation was probably complicated enough that during the transition the vertices would collapse. during the transition. While my first solution was to add intermediate stages, I had far more success simply building the intermediate stage first. Only needing one which could also provide control over how the transformation takes place.

  It dawned on me how I have a lot of bones in my model. But I don't mind a challenge and what I have os far appears to work effectively.

Adding corrective blend shapes was a minor detour since what still remains are a way for the spine to work, and a function that allows Four's eyes to track the eye control nodes.

Four: The Face Comes To Life

  With the primary model more-or-less skinned and the groundwork for the blendshapes in place. I mainly worked on refining what I had, typing the controls together and making sure everything blends correctly.

  The mouth still needs to be paired up but the eye, eyelids and the cheeks and brow are all hooked up. Using a system of clusters I concocted a way to control the radius of the pupil. This kind of feature would be especially important near the end of the animation as the doors open and Four is bathed in light. Her pupils would shrink to pinpricks as her eyes adjusted to the bright light.

  When programming the eyelids I also gave thought to widening beyond the "neutral" stance. Which on visualisation really hits a feeling of Surprise in Four

Windows to the soul indeed. Adding controls for the lips will add further character I'm certain. Everything seems to be going well so far.

  Proof that there is a weight network in place for the lips.