Colo Colo: Head, Feet and Chest

  Progress is developing nicely with Colo Colo, progress with the texture maps are coming along. For the most part I think the body is in a state I can consider it finished.

  The one issue so far is that there is a problem with the thigh's UV. One line down the very front of each thigh for the rear leg seems to be getting errors. When smoothed, this one line wraps around itself, creating an artifact in the form of a highly compressed duplicate of the rear leg's texture that fits between this vertical line of UVs and one set of UVs on its of the UV map, effectively projecting the rear leg's UV down one line of faces. This error however, does not show up in the projection in the viewport but that can be down to a lower-quality projection.

  One thing I have definitely concluded working on this is that at some point I'll need to go into Mudbox to fix the seams between the projections. I had attempted to mimic the colour of the legs between the two projections, but due to the way I had shaded the leg in the body texture map, the translation wasn't perfect. The above render is the closest I might be able to get for now.

  Errors aside, I have made a lot of progress on the head for Colo Colo. Texturing as something to resemble the concept art I had made, I think I'm fairly close. The other major thing I added was a mechanism to mimic the effect of the creature's heart beating or lungs cycling (chest motion essentially). At present it may be slightly too rapid, but I can control the rate as the chest expansion is tied to a driven key and an attribute in the shoulder control. The testing speed is based on how small creatures tend to have very fast heart-rates, as well as looking at some footage of lizards and myself in a mirror to get an idea of how extreme the inhalation and exhalation is during the breathing cycle.

  The beauty of controlling the rate like this is that with only a couple of tweaks, the breathing rate can be refined, or this rate is for when it exerts itself. Though changes in rate might involve either swapping out for a fresh duplicate with the differing or transitional rate, or input each cycle by copying and pasting.

  Or a MEL script.