3D Character. Part final: Modelling, Rigging and troubles.

From the very beginning, I knew that I want to create something charming and simple.

My art style is quite minimal and straightforward, so I wanted to create something that would come from my heart, to make it in my way and manner, and to enjoy the process of making my pencil drawn characters looking real in 3D.

This will be a post about troubles, experiments and learning.

On the moment when I have started to work with the modelling and the animation, I had minimal experience working with Maya.

At first I started to sculpt Yeti in Blender but found out two things:

1) We aren't allowed to make the animation in this software :(

2) Sculpting is uccecesarry for this project.

So I opened the Maya and started by creating the Yeti. Even if the model looks pretty simple, during its creating, I learnt a lot of things, such as working with Mirror, Editing the pivots, smoothing objects, combining them, and many others tools. I used the simple materials for the character to give him a cartoony look.

In my initial idea, I wanted to make the characters fluffy. I spend working on the fur quite a lot of time and actually loved the result. But when I placed my character into the environment, I loved how it looked without the fur. I think this is because the hair I was trying to make was too lifelike. And it didn't look quite an in balance.

BUT in the future, if I would decide to revisit this project, I would definitely go for a furry look and more realistic environment. Here are some processes:

After creating the character, I started to work in the mountain environment.

It was pretty easy to create the scene itself, but quite hard to create the river. I wanted to create water, that would be movable, reflective, but still not entirely realistic. The built-in Ocean Shader was looking perfect, but unfortunately, Arnold Render doesn't show it. So I had to find another way. I watched tutorials with the Bifrost, but it seemed too complicated and too realistic. I ended up by creating the transparent shader with the Water Disclosure Map in it's Alpha. To make the water animated. I set up the keyframe for the first and frame in the animation, where on the first frame the water's speed was 0 and on the last one increased number (depending on the water flow speed I required). To make the water visible, I duplicated the water object, changed its colour and placed under the transparent.

Here are the four scenes I've built in the end:

The next step was the rigging.

This was, honestly, the hardest and most nervous part. Even in the class, I have mostly had problems with understanding how to rig the character. So, in the beginning, nothing worked. The skeleton was divided from the body, broken or didn't appear at all. I didn't know what to do and felt quite stressed.

One of the surprising things for me was the realisation of the importance of outliner. I found out also how important it is to delete the unnecessary history. So only when I removed all the excess objects from the scene and outliner and centred the pivots for all the objects, I could successfully combine my model. I also had to delete the central part of the extra body inside of the main body to make it work.

But after the scary deformations came by. This is when I learnt about the skin weight tool. Using this tool helped me to resolve the deformation issue a lot. However, on this stage, I realised that I possibly made some mistakes with the modelling itself, as I couldn't fully get rid of deformation. I certainly would like to dig into this question more and to improve my skills of rigging.

For the next step, I started to animate the camera. On this stage, my audio guy has sent me the animated storyboard with the audio, and I began to work as he provided the sounds on the sound spreadsheet. I calculated the frames and created one camera. Next, I started to animate the character and after repeat the same process for the Yoko and her environment.

I appreciated this process a lot. I tried to use as little as possible tutorials and try to find out the solutions by myself. I learned a lot about lighting, camera, rigging. I learned how to work with the keyframes and to model much quicker than ever before. I learned hotkeys and different tools. I see the issues in my animation, but I'm much more confident in finding how to resolve them.