Narrative Project: Occlusion Maps

  With many of our assets completed I looked into a few of the models I had contributed for and looked into creating occlusion sets for them. This helps give an idea of these models in their purest form with no textures, no shiny effects and no animation and a good idea of where things overlap, stand out in terms of geometry and cast shadows.

  I only made the scales of the fish, but part of their creation involved mapping their arrangement on our fish characters.

Narrative Project: Rigging Complete

   I can say with confidence that the coral is finished. The skeleton within allows for the coral branches to be posed, which will be useful when the coral is needed to pursue and surround our fish characters.

  There was a little refinement to do with the skin weights as there was a sizeable spread especially further up. This was cleaned up mostly with a bit of work and the use of the 'prune weights' feature, which removed some of the more persistant abberant weights.

 

  For the most part, rigging has worked. The coral is flexible yet rigid and aside from maybe one or two points at the very tips (fortunately not all the coral branches do this), the integrity of the coral holds up well.

  The stage after this was to set up a control network to position the coral branches, which took some experimentation to strike the right balance between amount of control and number of control nodes to use.

  As of writing, now that it is completed, the current number stands at six. With each control unit controlling between three and five joints. Where there was a split, the joints were labelled "-A and -B" in the channel box.

Coral Development

   I spent most of today working on correcting the UV map for the coral. The reasoning for this was an attempt to have the shader's progression up the coral correlate better with the contours of the geometry.

  The methodology seemed straightforward: Cut apart the UV map at each split zone, modify the UVs to give a flat-on shape, straighten everything out. As can be seen in the picture below, the new strategy allows the gradient map to better follow the flow of the model. The main reason for this was that on tests the model's gradient colour was static, so to give the effect of older parts of the coral darkening I had to animate the shader parameters.

  Using a shader I think gives me some freedoms, as it means I do not have to completely unfold the model in order to get the desired result and anywhere that appears non-existent (such as side-on faces) on the UV plane is not stretched to moment-ruining distortion.

  The effects are subtle, but the model is certainly proving complex as working on it ate up most of the day. Nonetheless this is time that might be useful. Even if we have to use a playblast for our animation, the effect is still there in the workspace and therefore will be visible on the playblast. 

  It's not quite finished yet, perhaps an hour or two to finish the final branches on Tuesday and I can move on to other tasks. So far the shader works okay although I might need more difference in coloration for the effect to be noticeable. While working I had noticed that the topmost buds (that have been mapped) aren't actually sprouting, indicating I missed a step. Fortunately this hiccup is hardly noticeable on the model and probably will remain such when the structure is used in the animation.