i found this tutorial that shows howto create and texture some wedding rings, the modeling wasn't helpful but the chrome texture did as i used it on my safe.
I used the settings i found here as a base and modified the texture to suit my needs by adding a radial reflection, and changing the base colour to black for a shiny black metal.
It's the end of thursday and it looks like i should be ok to hand in on time. i have complete my animation, my model sheet, my storyboards and everything else i planned to in my time plan, but it's taken a lot of time.
my cinema 4D crashed during my final render so ill have to settle for a lower quality one, although i did alter the lgihting to make it look as good as i could.
my time managment this week has been very good, which is a change, but i did plan to do a lot of work.
I decided to look at this video of the film by lemony snicket, a series of unfortunate events. The environments and setting of this film were originally what i wanted my character to be set in, and i wanted him to have an excentric was of acting like the charactrer count olaf.
As i looked at heavy rain in my character aniamtion research i thought i should add a video showing some of the character aniamtiont o my blog. Heavy rain is a game for PS3 about a killer and shows the story from several different peoples perspectives, a victims father, a Private investigator, a newspaper editor, and an FBI agent. The games story is very character driven and to ensure this is top quality they made their voice actors go through every scene in motion capture to make the movements as realistic as possible aswell as motion capturing every voice scene/conversation.
The charcters are quite well done, and the story is very interesting, the characters express themselves well but the fbi ages constantly looks confused when i think the expression they were going for was thinking.
other than that the character modeling and aniamtion are brilliant, but the voice acting isnt great, and kind of throws off the realism of the characters.
i found this video which has a colleciton of 3D character work, which all varies in quality. Most of it is quite good, but the first aniamtion shown i feel the texturing is quite bad, the colours are too bringt and done work with the background aswell as having no real shadows or self shading. There is some aniamtion of the hulk there two which i assume was from a game gameplay cutscene, which although brief looked quite good with what i would concider several years old graphics for a currect generation console.
The last aniamtion they is seen is my favorite and why i added this video, the character looks well made and is textured well, he has soft shadowing which i guess is some kind of ambient occlusion. His movements are smooth and his arm and hand seem to move well and smoothly which makes me thing his hands are rigged with bones. his facial features are my favorite part, large parts of his face move as he talks and his jaw and the whole lower part of his face move side to side as he speaks which i like and would like to find otu how it is done.
I foudn this aniamtion and decided to post it. I think the character design of the blue goblin is quite good, and the face has some nice complexity to it. the aniamtion runs to a soundclip of the film 300. The models might be ok, but the animation, esspecially to start with, is jumpy and doesnt look right at all to me, and the movements dont flow well and dont have speed or strength behind them, and there is no follow through on movements.
The facial expressions dont change much and the talking look quite bad, the mouth movement is simple the jaw being lowered with very little movement to the lips or mouth shape, other than it being stretched outward to make it smile.
I really dislike the camera work as it moves at the rate the character does as he moves around which takes even more out of the speed and power of the movements. this might be because he was trying to keep it as much like the film 300 as possibl ebut as there are no background elements and no oponent it it just looks wrong.
I decided to look at another mecha model as a comparison, this one is much less complex and has a lower polygon count, but i feel its not much worse, the design is less generic, more original and has better proportions, for those reasons i prefer this one, but if i had the choice to model either of those myself i could combine their different qualities, the design and inventive legs of this one, but the detail and exposed pistons and cables of the last one.
