For this assignment I am making one character in a game for the theme of cute festivals of my culture. This character is targeted to a young audience. Therefore, I need to draw/sketch how the character will look like. I first need to plan out the steps involved in making this character and then create a mind map of how this character will look like and what themes I am considering.
- Character Design
- Character 3D Modelling
- Character UV & Texture
- Character Rigging
- Character Animation & MoCap
- Character Rendering
Since I am making a MoCap to create the animations of the character, it must have 2 legs, 2 arms, a head and a body connecting all limbs. A humanoid rig.
Picto Plasma – similar style
Cultures? Vietnam
Festivals:
Tet à Red Packets, Lion Dance, Zodiac, Flowers, gold
Hung King à Temples, Dragon, King
During my research of this mood board I started to settle with going for a Chinese humanoid lion warrior mainly because the limbs are easier to animate through mo-cap. My first thoughts of the design of this lion was going to be in the style of Alex from Madagascar but have facial characteristics of the lion costume and statue as well as the armour of a Chinese warrior. Using my mood board I will design my character. I felt it was a good idea to create a character profile to cement my vision of this character will look like. I had to also think about the colours and basic textures of what the warmer colour pallet –> analogous colour scheme –> groups of three colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel. I did want vibrant colours because it would appeal more to children.
Character Profile
Name: XIAO Zhan
Gender: Male –> because of mane
Cultural Background: China
Symbolization: Lion à strength, stability and superiority Dragon à power, boldness and excellence
Purpose: educate children the significance of family, friends and the sense of community. He’s seen as a hero and a symbol of unity.
Education: Gifted
Fears: none –> built different
Religion: Buddhist
3D Modelling the Character
I first started out the lion using a pre-made model on Maya Autodesk. The model was titled as monster figure and the shape was somewhat humanoid but also very vague as to what the character could be. I found this to be time efficient as then I wouldn’t need to spend time blocking out the model and can go straight into the details of the lion. During this I realized there were some parts of the lion that were going to be props that would be made separately. This was because of how the rigging system works on Maya. Therefore, the mane, sword and skirt will be modeled, and UV wrapped separately. During this process I took a very long time to feel satisfied with the outcome of my models. It was frustrating since I knew that without the model being finished I cannot UV wrap to then texture my model and I cannot rig the model.
– Skirt
This was very simple to make and straight forward but the only thing I wanted to do was make the skirt flow using Maya’s physics plugins, but I was advised not to do this as it would take more time and could provide more complications to the rigging process.
– Sword
Modelling a sword was harder than expected I thought the simple geometry of a sword and the multiple tutorials online on how to make one would make this straight forward but when I was making it, the edge loops would be misaligned to where I wanted them, sometimes the geometry was buggy and hard to shape. Eventually I did make it, but I sacrificed the extra details on the handle to save time since it was only a prop and not too significant to the project.
– Mane
At first, I was going to create a sort of helmet and the use sculpting tools to make it look like flowing hair but then it didn’t look appealing aesthetically, so I created large follicles of hair and copy pasted them over the scalp of the lion’s head. This took some time to position the follicles as there were many and angling them to resemble a mane of a lion was difficult. In this situation I was focused on making something that looked appealing more than accurate to a real lion.
UV unwrapping and Texturing
Once I finished modelling, I would UV unwrap each object through camera-based view and then cutting along edges of the object depending on how it would be textured. The skirt I just cut in half from the back side, the sword along the middle so it was sliced in half vertically, body of the lion was split through the major limbs and the mane took the most time as there were many follicles.
After UV unwrapping, I was able to begin texturizing and colouring the UVs. I downloaded the UV maps and went onto adobe photoshop to paint the UV. It took some time as I also needed to refer to the UV editor to add details onto the UV for example when painting the belt, I needed to know the centre of the belt is and how big the buckle would look like. I also would paint over lines to ensure that the entire UV would be filled with that colour. I also needed to make sure that it didn’t cross over into a different UV. In other words, colouring between the lines. This was straining my hand a lot because I had to be accurate with the painting. I then needed to select materials that the UVs would be put on. I mostly played around with the reflectivity and roughness of the materials so that it would look like clothes and less like shiny armour.
Rigging
The quick rig step-by-step feature made this project much easier than the longer method of rigging. The problem lies where I initially made the model not in T-pose. Apparently, this creates problems when skinning the rig to the model. To fix this I created a rig onto the non-t-pose lion so that I can move the arms and legs so I can put it in t-pose. I then deleted its history and then removed the control rig and then redo the control rig again. I now do the weight painting. Placing the guides for the rig was simple as you just needed to move them a little bit to where the joints would be on your model. To make sure they are positioned correctly I use the plane views to help me with this. I did initially have trouble with it because Maya would start putting influence into unrelated parts that I cannot erase easily. It is hard to explain but there would be spikes coming out from different parts of the body. The fix for it was instead of using the black and white paint I used the multi coloured one so I can see more clearly the levels of influence and can cut them out. I would test the rig by moving the joints and seeing if it moves smoothly or not. If it didn’t then I go back into weight painting to adjust the influence.
Animation
Since there was no mocap available to me I used animations on Mixamo.com. I picked an animation that wielded a sword since my character has a sword. Surely enough there was an entire pack of them. I uploaded the character to Mixamo and by luck it accepted the rig I put on it, so I then downloaded the entire pack. The next part was a little harder and time consuming, I now needed to clip all the animations together. For each animation clip I used the Trax editor and I had to define the frames and slided along the order of animation. I wanted the animations to blend through each animation but I wasn’t able to do that mainly because they were pre-made and were not made to be in sequence. Another problem I had was the positions of the character when I would play the animation. Since the animation has its own position co-ordinates I had to modify them. Fortunately all I needed to change was the reference position so I set them to y=0 (which is the ground for my project) However, I think there was some complications to it. This works only for animations that aren’t jumping or crouching, for those animations I would need to offset the positions so that the lowest point was at y=0. I created a camera and aim so the camera was static in one position and it would aim at the center of the lion. I then created an environment similar to a studio shoot with area lighting from top and both sides.
Rendering