Creating the Main Character
Throughout the past year at uni, I have been attempting to improve my skills in modelling, texturing and rigging. The main character that I intend to use in the final film piece is actually a little girl that I have modeled sometime ago in Maya. As I previously stated, I decided to use stylized animation rather than a live action character, as with the environment I intend to border on realism as this film is set in a non-fiction sort of time.
Built from references of sketches for character, I built a simple structure of a little girl, needs a bit of clean up obviously in certain areas but will not worry too much about it as I'll be modeling a dress for her.
Near completion with model and a few early CV curves intended for hair follicles. May need to work on hairstyle though.
Of course every character should have a way to express emotions, mainly body language and facial expressions. In order to achieve changing the character's face to a new type of expression, I produced a set of blendshapes by duplicating the head a certain amount of times and rearranged a number of vertices to slightly different positions to alter the shape of the character's face, one for each type of facial expression.
Created a rig and several constraints for the "skeleton" part of the character. Had to assign a smooth bind of the mesh to the rig and then used the "paint skin weights" tool to fix certain areas around the joints so the skin would move and change shape appropriately whenever a joint is used. Refined the CV Curves for hair and applied a nhair node to the head mesh. Have also applied locators and aim constraints to eyes, ready to be animated.
Applied a ncloth node to the skirt and adjusted the dynamic properties of the "cloth material" to imitate a particular type of cloth. And added a passive collider node to the whole character mesh so that the cloth would collide with her legs when she walks or moves so that it would react like real-life fabric.
Attempted to add a type of material shader to the character that would give it the look of human skin. Applied a "misss_fast_skin_maya" shader and adjusted the controls as well as assigning a texture map that I produced in Photoshop to the diffuse colour and epidermal scatter colour. Had to experiment with the controls before settling on the desired look.
Rendered shot of the eyebrow, using a grass paint effect mode.
Rendered shot with experimental directional lighting effect, ray trace shadows and global illumination modes are used.
Rendered shot with motion blur mode activated.
