Another WIP

[fktt]

yup, deffinetly a suitable character for a simple animation :)

[FreakyDude]

Ran into a little problem. Been subsurfing, multiressing applying etc. Call it sculping a duplicate of the head of this little fellow.
However, I forgot to unwrap it. first......
So I have this really clean unwrapped character and all, and want to somehow bake the high res mesh to a texture. NOT A NORMAL MAP! Just a regular texture. As in bake full texture. I tried this on bob, and worked, yet didn't look like good skin and such. (hmm just noticed the normal button hmmm? the wrong kind maybe? it burns some normals at least....)

Long story short: How can I best get the high res head nicely wrapped around the low poly unwrapped head? After I first burned it to a "full render" texture. The mesh is too dense to make all those seams again.
More importantly, the burn feature only works if there is an image to burn to to begin with. So should it be unwrapped after all?

This is the head I'm talking about anyway:
http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/7048/screencap01ym9.jpg

[FreakyDude]

Small update, nothing visually interesting, but found a solution or two. Not how I would easily redo the high poly to the lowpoly yet, but I think I know a hack that might get similar results. Like one of the feature videos for 2.44....

Anyway, found out how to bake. For those who care to know:
select your object in uv face select mode, select all, load the texture to write to (or create a new one to save or pack afterwards) in the uv image window/editor.
press the kind of bake you want to use (or press ctrl alt b in 3d viewport) and watch as it bakes away to your texture.
http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/2732/screencap01ww8.jpg

For this result (I know it looks like crap, it's about the technique behind it...for now...)
I made a duplicate which I gave about 3 or 4 material indexes. one for the shoes, overall, head and hands. Then I applied a different (procedural) material to them. Of course the duplicate has the same unwrap. set some bogey lights, switched to uv face select mode, select all, create a new texture in the uv editor, press bake, and watch it BURN BABY!.
then save and apply the baked image to the original mesh.

The original mesh with only one mat index is rendered here. Just thought that was cool :)

[timeless3d]

I found this tutorial to be the most helpful when I tried to make a character to learn about animation in blender:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Character_Animation

It goes from building the character to using the NLA. I found it to be the most helpful and comprehensive of all the tutorials I found. I went through this tutorial and made a character and animated it as they describe. After I did that, I went back and did it again with a model I had already built a while back but didn't know how to rig. You might want to do that, since you have gotten so far in your modeling.

Good luck!

[FreakyDude]

Hey thanks, heh I've done that one before, but I forgot most of the finer details about it. So yeah I am going to use that to get the first workable rig. My goal is to make a few of them untill I have a better understanding of how they work. Have you heard of the blendrig? it's very detailed/complicated apparently, but I intend to look into it once I have some rigs that kinda work before I get into actual animation lol.

Anyway, thanks for the link and for the reply, almost 350 views and only 2 replies other than from myself, that's a little low even for here. First new updates will have to wait for another week at least though...

[fktt]

Anyway, thanks for the link and for the reply, almost 350 views and only 2 replies other than from myself, that's a little low even for here. well, theres nothing much to comment right now :/

[FreakyDude]

True I suppose, still working on him. Mainly trying to texture him, which isn't harder than I thougt, but I suck at it so much.
unfortunately my windows boot has some anooying spamming virus, so fortunately it's forced me back to ubuntu, where gimp seems to work as I'd expect, it doesn't bork up my tablet settings. love the way you scroll with the mmb. Some things about the navigation I don't like:
is there a shortcut for zooming in and out the way you do in blender? ctrl+mmb or illustrator? alt+mouse wheel.
Ehm.... just found out that shift mousewheel does that but I wonder if I can set it to a combo with mmb, so I can have it work like in blender/no need to switch back to mouse all the time.

Anyhow, I'm currently started rigging him, gave up for texturing for now. I guess I'll better go for a decent rig first...

Brings me to a question:
How many of you use gimp? and specifically for textures/gametextures?
Any good tutorial links? googling gave me a bunch of stuff I didn't find all too usefull.
Even if there's someone with some kind of simple gimp game texture walkthough, i'd be a very happy camper...
Like blender when I first started, I can navigate like a charm in photoshop at work, but I keep crashing in gimp.

It just bothers me that I believe this little dude will look so much better with a decent texture on him. And I can't get it to work....

[RedSquirrel]

I use gimp allot now for my texturing, I loved using Photoshop in college that's all I used, but alas college ended and I thought I would give gimp a try again until I get enough cash to buy an adobe software bundle. :hmm:

For texturing what I usually do is just paint a little in blender then save that image and open it in the gimp add to it and clean it up.

Here's a little tip for tiled textures, say you have for example an image of a wall of bricks and you want to make a tiled texture form that, all you need to do is go too Layer---Transform---offset then press the button that says “Offset by x/2, y/2” press “OK” then clean up your image so that you get rid of those lines, once your finished that go too Layer---Transform---offset then press the button that says “Offset by x/2, y/2” again and there you have a tiled texture.

Also for a normal mapping plugin for Gimp go here http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/%7ecocidius/normalmap/

[fktt]

well, im on ubuntu myself so, its gimp exclusively! :D and i still havent figured out how to use the darn normal mapping plugin, used to use it all the time in winblows-doze but now under linux its a mystery, though i havent had much of a need for it, so its not a killer :)

[FreakyDude]

Maybe you know this: is there a way to navigate as smoothly with the pen as in blender? can I assign a hotkey to mmb to zoom in/out(dolly) or do I have to use the mouse for this?
If so, if there ever is a gimp/blender project or something, I hope they make this a possibility for default navigation. mmb for pan, (pen button3/2) ctrl mmb(pen button3/2) for zoom/dolly, and shift mmb(pen button3/2) for non destructive rotating, so you don't have to rotate your tablet all the time when drawing an akward line.

thanks for the plug, yeah I had to use some wall textures at work a while ago. the default from inventor lokoed like crap, so I shot some pictures with my cheap ass digital cam. made a bumpmap with one of gimps default filters which I accidentically found, and it looked ace.

The kind of textures I want to start making are those of unrealtournament/Residual decay(whatever the name was, it is cool)TC for UT, final fantasy crystal cronicles/LittleBigPlanet/MySims kinda textures.
I've little luck finding specific tutorials on textures in the gimp. I have a lot of small tutorials bookmarked, which I can't really put into any use currently.

Redsquirrel if you use it to make your textures, could you perhaps explain your typical workflow on this in the gimp? Hell if you want to I'll give you the blend of this character, it's unwrapped, you can have a go at it if you like.

I've made a first rig by the way, it works, it deforms kinda standard, but it works. trying to exploit it as much as i can and find its weak spots.
Then start over again.

[fktt]

right click for panning iirc, and i know i have zoomed with the some-key + mouse but cant even recall how to do that anymore, but if theres a way to remap it it should be found somewhere int he preferences, thats my best guess.. :p

as for tutorials just search for photoshop tutorials and try to follow those :)

[FreakyDude]

Aah well, I'll have to drop texturing for now or I'll never get to the animation.
new update:
http://img356.imageshack.us/img356/6417/fella01tq0.jpg

has a basic rig. Slight variation from the BSOD tutorial ( linked to by timeless3D here)
It has less loose parts, a little more IK constraints and TERRIBLE weight painting. it's way to hard to deform well.
I've given him wrist and ankle bones almost similar like the knee and leg bones. He also had an ankle bone between the lower leg and the foot bone, but I dropped it since I couldn't get it to snap right.
Think I'll do the animation tutorials first, then define the rig a bit and weight paint him better.
when all that shizzle is done, maybe I'll get back to texturing :rolleyes:

[fktt]

ok, just remembered how it was done, lol:

in gimp, image opened > [f11] > [ctrl]+[mouse scroll] works fine for me.. :)

[FreakyDude]

lol, i don't use a mouse when i draw and stuff i use a wacom pen. :P

[fktt]

well, my bad.. :/

[FreakyDude]

Hey no problem dude, other question you might know, getting offtopic but what the hell:
alt rmb does a loop select in windows, but in ubuntu it gives a rmb menu, I think gnome has a higher priority/overrules this shortcut combination. Would you know how to turn this off? or at least for blender?

[fktt]

well, i know you can turn this off but i cant remember how :P

but another fix would be to push shift+alt+rmb instead :)

[FreakyDude]

Yeah, but that is more of a makeshift thing. It would work though. Sure beats using ctrl e menu all the time.
Another small update, one more control bone, added IK to the spine. Weight paint it again, but didn't save or render, since it wasn't any better anyhow. When I figure out what way best to paint him, I sure hope the copy/mirror weight paint script works, because xmirror paint doesn't work if you edit the vertex groups in edit mode afterwards. Even if these edits are completely symmetrically. (EDIT before post lol: just noticed xmirror was off for some reason, so maybe that isn't true)
images:
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/5235/fella02xn4.jpg
http://img129.imageshack.us/img129/3596/screendump01mh4.jpg
I have a question regarding weighting:
Every bone has a 100% influence over the vertex assigned to it and these vertex do more or less line up nicely with the range/length of the bones. ( well, they will when I redo the bones in the hand/other places I find troublesome) they don't really overlap.
This gives very harsh deformations when posing the armature. I suppose I should " smooth" out the weighting a bit, but should I let the influence overlap other "bonearea's"? or should I just make the current edges softer.
I've briefly tried both ways, one on the left, and one on the right. and the results looked just as bad. only kinda "mirrored".
Should I add more edgeloops, or redo some of the topology or weight or change the armature?

[FreakyDude]

Another question: I intend to give him some facial animations. what's best to use for this character, bones or shapekeys? If i want to do "lip sync" particularly.
what are the pros and cons of each method?

[fktt]

well, id say its good youve kept your model so simple, it should be farily easy to make the shapekeys on this one, imo.. :)

[FreakyDude]

I think I'll go for shapekeys then. not today anymore though..... (sleeeeeeepy)

[FreakyDude]

another update, tried a first walkcycle, a varaiation from the bsoc character animation, but i have a problem with his hands.
I try to get some handles like the one in the otto rig, he apparently has a fingers bend action, with an animation of the hand folding, and all the fingers have an action constraint which has an empty finger bone as a controller bone to drive the bending of all the bones in a finger. So i made a crappy finger bend action, and set up the action constraints the same way, but either the bones start bending the wrong way, or the controller finger bone has to be rotated the other way around, or all the finger bones "curl up", or simply nothing happens. I've altered min/max values, begin/end values, and changed the actual finger rotation action. No good results at all.
Does anyone have any ideas as to how to set up these finger bones properly?

Anyway, link to current animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SS3uBCO8OA (http://www.youtube.com/v/8SS3uBCO8OA)

Edit: link was wrong

[FreakyDude]

I've got an update. I've looked around a bit, and while the result doesn't really show in the stills, I'm quite happy with the results because i think they might be the, or at least A good way to go.
But I've been playing with it all day and once I get point A to move right, point B gets borked up:
screens:
http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/1473/fella03hi8.jpg
Shot at 2007-07-01
http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/7495/bonesetup01ux8.jpg
Shot at 2007-07-01

I have given him additional bones in the chest, shoulder plates, armpits and upper arm/elbow area.
I first used target constraints to lock the "deform bones" to little bones which I parented to either the lowerarm/upperarm/shoulder/neck.
But then once you bend the arm too far the bone goes through the targeted bone, so I used stretchy instead. which is a little trickier to control I think, but results seem better so far.
I've painted the weights in those areas again, and the arms bend a lot better up and down and to the front and back now.
Some problems occur when I start twisting the arms though.
I've looked at the known rigs, like mancandy, ludwig, otto, and I tried blenrig but it is packed in rar, haven't got an app installed yet that opens that.
It seems that ludwig doesn't even have vertgroups for his body! including the fingers, is he using only the envelopes? wow, some precise fitting then!
mancandy has a LOT of small vertgroups on several small helper bones, but then again his arm is set up a lot more complex then mine needs to be. it's like looking at spaggeti right now.

I know I have to rework the hands on the bones in it, but still:
both otto and ludwig have these bones which drive an action where the fingers bend, but both these actions start with the fingers bending the wrong way. Long story short, I can't reproduce this effect. Even if I make an action with fingers bend the wrong way first and then bend them the right way, with about the same number of keyframes, when I rotate the fingercontrol bone, the fingerbone rotate like crazy, no matter what my settings.

I know there's a number of good blender riggers out here, I've looked through the wiki and some other places that cover rigging, it's not that I can't find the info, I can't really adapt it in this character. If anyone could give me a small example of what to do or where to look, I'd be very gratefull.
If someone wants the file to check it out/make some quick fixes for me to study, they are welcome to. I'll upload it.

[FreakyDude]

Okay, I've been keeping this one kind of active at blenderartists.org, and didn't post updates here for a while, but it's getting close to being finished, plus I wanna move on anyway.
A went full circle a few times, from no deformbones to a lot of em to no deformbones and back to a lot of em to no deformbones again. This is the best setup I've been able to get so far.

I've seen a very nice gorilla rig which gave me some ideas, done a few quick tests, not so very good, but what I want seems possible in blender..... IK with no chainlength and stiffness/locks in the bones..... Maybe for the next project someday...

I still need to weight the fingers, make some displayobjects for the controller bones and make a simple facial rig or something, but I think I can call it pretty much near finished. If there's people who want to try the rig I'll probably upload it here, I'm actually a little curious about the feedback anyway.
Images first:
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/6234/bonesetup05op4.jpg
Shot at 2007-08-10
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/5617/fella05og4.jpg
Shot at 2007-08-10

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