Rigging: Blendshapes

Here's a quick preview of the blendshapes that I've made for my rig. By combining two or more in animation I can get a pretty good range and variety of expression :)

Look Develpment: Reference

A good reference for the style I'm going for with textures etc.

Animation: video ref

Brian and Rudy very kindly helped me to shot some reference footage as an anim guide - here are some of the shots:

Environment Design: perfect reference

Thanks to Garry (http://garrywhittonanimator.wordpress.com/) I now have some perfect ref for my environments.

He was walking through Edinburgh, saw these in a gallery window and immediately thought of my project, and he's right - they're exactly the look that I'm going for. Thanks Garry! :D

The gallery is the Red Door Gallery (it's a lovely place, make sure you pop in if you're ever in Edinburgh) and the artist is the very talented Mr David Fleck: http://fleck-tesseract.tumblr.com/

Mia_x layered shaders

I've just mastered layered shaders using mia_x materials. Tons of forum posts said it wasn't possible then I found this genius tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uRx3ID5oMY

(NB remember to check the 'alpha is luminance' box on the texture that you're using as an alpha - for some reason that's the step I always forget to do)

I'm loath to share this image as there's SO much work still to do to get it to look right, but using layered shaders enabled me to get a wood shader onto the hands and a separate graphite shader onto the 'nails'.

Writer: Wood Texture

And here's my first attempt at applying a wood texture to my model.

Wood Texture Tutorial

This tutorial has been an invaluable starting point in trying to get a wood texture working for my main character::)

http://www.pixelophy.com/?p=105

Look Development: Contour Rendering

I'm hoping to create a 'drawn' look for my environments by combining contour renders with illustrative textures. Here's my first attempt at rendering contours - it needs a lot of tweaking but. having done this quick test, I'm now confident that it's going to work eventually :)

 

Rigging: blend shape sketches

Brian Lindsay (http://www.yodasportrait.blogspot.co.uk/) very kindly did me some sketches as reference for modelling blend shapes - thanks Brian!

Animatic: "Acorns"

Here's my new animatic, let me know what you think.