A Couple of Tutorials

1. Cartoon Eyes

In this tutorial we learnt how to create some cartoon style boggly eyes, complete with movable blinking eyelids. Using basic spheres I modeled the eyes, with two eyelids (upper and lower) and also the head and nose of my rat creature. I then modeled two large ears by manipulating a further two spheres. Using FFD boxes I was able to warp and manipulate the head, nose and eyes into the shapes that I wanted. I used the FFD boxes on each eye and its counterparts to create a sneaky and villainous look for my character which I thought turned out quite well. I added two look at constraints, one on each eye so that the direction of the pupils could be moved independently. I made the pupils follow the shape of each eye to add to the overall shifty look of my rodent.

I particularly enjoyed this tutorial and think that eyes such as these will work really well in my chosen villain Sir Terry Timepiece, although I do quite like my rat character which I will keep incase my whole idea changes or I end up including him as a secondary character in my final animation.

2. Boning and Skinning

In this tutorial we learnt about boning and skinning a model so that it can be moved and manipulated for animation using bipeds and rigging. Initially I modeled a simple figure to which I could add some bones. I then used the biped to add his bones, manipulating them to fit his limbs and moving them into position. From this I then added a skin modifier to attach the model to the rig. This didn't work as planned. unfortunately the model and rig did not like the idea of becoming linked by skinning and even though the bones were added correctly to the skin modifier, both entities seemed determined to stay isolated. I continued to try this method and even completely re-modeled my figure due to his feet originally being at a strange angle to his legs (see above) even this, however did not fix the issue. I then tried using the physique modifier instead and manipulated the envelopes to encompass my whole model. This worked in a sense, in the issue regarding the model and rig becoming linked, it did not however work well. Every time I tried to move the rig, various sections of my model's arm would twist in on itself and I was at a bit of a loss as to how to fix this. 

Although this tutorial was not entirely successful, it did help me to understand the techniques used and I intend to use bones to create a rig for Sir Terry that will fit his proportions correctly which I will then use and hopefully link using the skin modifier once I have figured out what my issue was.