Viking (part of a personal animation challenge)

#1

I occasionally take some time and do these little challenges for myself. The general idea is to create an animation in the shortest time possible.

Here are the last 2 I did:

//youtu.be/K2hTLlRo34U

//youtu.be/nGsxTQrxE7M

So I’ve decided to do a similar thing but over the next 2 months, focusing on a balance of quality and speed.
The final animation will be around 2 minutes long, and involve my current favorite topic - Vikings!

Im using the same techniques as before - DAZ, Mixamo, lots of comp tricks - but Ill also be delving into custom mocap (using Kinects) and facial capture.

Here is 2 nights of work so far. Base model from DAZ, custom textures and additional modeling.
This current character is completely skinned and bone driven, so there is no additional simulation here. I do have a version done using MAX’s Cloth - but switched to mCloth last night for speed! The cloth will be the sleeves (you can see the pinching which will be covered by the cloth), an animal skin draped over his shoulder, and the bottom of the tunic and belt.

As this is a project where I am relying on speed, Im going to be doing a lot of post processing on the WIP images so that I can see what details get covered and where to concentrate my efforts.

In terms of design, I know that this is closer to a ‘comic book viking’ with the horns and belts, but because the animation is gonna be so short I need to go with the traditional ‘this is a viking’ silhouette.

#2

His shoulder rig seems a bit strange. Upper arm shouldn’t twist that much. Right now I can see his triceps popping out so much that it looks like a bicep. Most of the twist for our palm should come from our lower arm. Other than that it seems pretty solid.

#3

I completely agree. There will be a cloth sim on the sleeves that covers up that pinching. Its also happening on the torso by the crotch (although less noticeable) where there will also be a cloth sim.

I’m just trying to figure out how to get mCloth to work on deformable meshes! If I cant figure out out Ill go back to normal cloth.

#4

What’s wrong with your simulations? I just did a test with an animated cylinder (skinned, not just transform animated) and a rectangle piece of cloth. Works like a charm. I’m assuming you’re using nCloth in Maya. And I hope you know that it needs some scale tweaking (if I recall, ncloth interprets centimeters as meters by default)?