This video took 24 hours to render, which means that, realisticaly, I'm gonna need a render farm to produce an animated series. I can't be waiting weeks to render each episode. That's for sure. Anyway, enjoy! This character was created from scratch at the beginning of the semester back in January of 2013. By the way, the opinions of the character in this video do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of the staff here at Breen Design. lol

Here's a shorter version of my tutorial for Mirroring Skin Morphs.

It's time to give Emo a uniform!

My first test render of Menace Man. I'm going to wait until he's fully animated before I add the accessories (hat, glasses, goatee) and program them to follow his face using the 3D Studio Max "Skin Wrap" modifier. Besides the obvious issues with the eyes and the over-sensative camera sensor, I think it looks pretty darn good so far! Now to tweak some things...

Things are starting to come together!

I'm just about finished with Emo and ready to apply some full body motion capture. The skinning could still use some work around the joints, and it will take the Skin Morph modifer to finished the job right. Skin Morph is a very handy modifer that allows you to model precisely what you want your joints to look like at any given bend. The modifier then lets you set angle parameters that dictate when the joints will begin to morph into your fine-tuned joint distortion typology. Very nifty! Thanks teach for sharing this one.

Here's a first draft of a commercial I'm working on for Living Styles Furniture. The music got cut off toward the end because I rendered the video in Quicktime, and for some reason it extended the length of the video by 30 seconds, but not the sound. Very strange.

On another note, the images do seem to fade out a bit too fast for the viewer to catch, so that's something else I'll need to fix in my next rendering.

Today during class, I "unwrapped" Emo's UVW's. So what does that mean? This process is to ensure that his skin textures come out evenly and with as little distortion as possible. The seams are where the checker pattern is broken. They are almost impossible to avoid, so it's best to put them in places that won't usually been seen. Under the arm pits for example, or on top of the head - assuming your character has hair that will cover that seam line up. The better this checker pattern matches up, the better my paint job will look in Mudbox.

Here's a short clip of some motion tracking techniques we're working on in the production studio at Santa Rosa Junior Collge. Very cool stuff, full of new possibilities.

-David

I applied a UVW Unwrap to Emo's head and gave him a nice skin texture. I'm also playing around with the hair and fur modifier. The render times on the hair aren't too bad as long as I keep the detail relatively low. As you can see on the zoomed in image of his nose below, the detail is very sweet - thanks the bump mapping. Once I get this guy into Mudbox, I can start to apply all kinds of other effects to make his skin look more realistic.