Melvins Leg Rigged

This is a screen shot of my 3D character in the first stages of rigging. In this image i have rigged the leg. by going to character, joint set up, hold control and clock where you want the joints to go. Then i labeled the joints so i didn't get confused. Then right click your first joint, go to character tags, then go to IK. In the attribute manager, drag the ankle joint into the empty field, and add a goal and a pole.

This week i am going to be rigging my 3D character, starting with the legs, working my way up to the spine, then to the arms etc. The process is simple enough when you know the method. On Cinema 4D, make the character editable, go to character, then joint setup, hold control on the keyboard, and click the places on your characters body were you would like to place the joints.

Melvin 3D Coloured

This is a screen shot of my 3D character coloured. To do this we used body paint in cinema 4D. To do this we had to make the image editable, then go to the box icon in the top left hand corner and go to BP UV Edit, this allows you to get the colouring options up. Then from here you click on the paint brush icon with the stars around it, and this will make your character accessible for painting. Then simply go to colour, choose your colours, and colour in your character. This is just the first base tone of my character, i havnt yet began to put any tone or depth into it, but i will start that eventually.

Melvin Rendered 3d 2

This is the latest screen shot of Melvin, the symmetry has been added, and i have welded all the bits together, and made a few modifications to the ears and back to give it more depth.

Melvin 3D Ears

This is a screen shot of when i was creating Melvin's ears, this as relatively similar to making the hands. using the knife tool to select the three spaces you want to extrude, then rotating and resizing them to get them to the shape i eventually wanted. After this i started giving the body and head more depth by making the backs and fronts bigger.

Melvin 3D Nose Job

This is a zoomed in view of Melvin's face when i was creating the nose, it took a few tests to decide on the perfect size for his nose because i wanted it to hang below his mouth like on the original designs. But after fiddling around with it a bit i decided i liked it better a little higher than initially planned.

Melvin 3D Rendered

This is the best i've done with the 3D character so far, only half the image has been designed because we make it symmetrical afterwards which basically just copies that side to the other. I still have to texture and rig it but thats an upcoming process. once i got the hang of it the body, hands and head was quite simple, but the face itself was a bit tricky to get the hand of, but with a little help from a man they call the genius i mastered it eventually!

Melvin Flemiwink 3D 2 in Cinema 4D

This is yet another screen shot of Melvin in the process of being made into a 3D model, this still was a failure, the arms and legs where fine but the body had to be completely redone so it would animated properly.

Melvin Flemiwink 3D in Cinema 4D

This is a screen shot of Melvin being created as a 3D model on cinema 4D this was the first attempt at him, and wasn't good at all, this was when i was just getting used to the aspect of 3D and eventually had to start fresh because it looked that bad and i had that many problems with it. The character didn't look that bad, it just wouldn't of animated properly when it was rigged so starting it all over again was my only option.

This is the second page of my character sheets, showing the different facial expressions he may have. yet again textured and with the same background and use of colour, this one has a brief description of the character, where he lives, what he does etc.

This is one of the two character sheets i designed for my 3D character Melvin Flemiwink. He lives in a forest and eats plants, berries and shellfish, so i thought the foresty background i chose was appropriate for the character himself. I added a scale texture to his body, as he is a lizard like character. It shows a front, back and side view of the character, and in the top left hand corner the colours used on his body.

E4 Bird And The Berries Animation!

This is the animation i eventually created for the E4 brief. This was one of my favourite projects out of the ones we have done, simply because we had total freedom in what we did, except for it couldn't be violent, rude, or have bad language in it for television presentation. but other than that the general theme, characters, etc was all up to us. Designing the bird was the first step, well after thinking of the idea to present the E4 logo. once i had concluded on a design for the bird, i had to draw him up. i decided to animate the bird in pose to pose first and then scan the individual drawings onto the computer and put them into the animation from there. However, I hit a bump in the road when trying to get the bird images onto the computer, my original plan was to scan them in but apparently that would of been much more time consuming and not as precise as using the dragon software and photographing them in. So thats what i did, then i live traced, and live painted all the 24 birds, and then they were ready to be put onto my animation. Before i uploaded the bird onto cinema 4D though, i had to create the assets for the background, which i done all in illustrator and wasn't difficult at all. From there the animation began, the bird was already done, it was just a matter of animating a few of the props like the berries, and the eggs. The eggs were another problem i came across, i had to animate 93 eggs individually which took me about 3 hours and was insanely boring! But once they had all been animated the end result looked quite funny in my opinion. There were also some glitches with the alpha channels of the eggs but i sorted the majority of them out in the time i had. To finish all i had to do was animate the baby E4 logos and add in the sound. the E4 logos were easy enough to do, that took me about half an hour to get them all up and running. Then there was the final part, the sound! This consisted of downloaded noises from the internet, which were just ridiculous and some of which had nothing to do with the character itself, but linked in a good way all the same. I initially wanted to record my own sounds, as i preferred this being a more original way of doing it. however there was a shortage of computers at the time and i had problems transferring the sounds from one computer to another so i had to use other sounds to save time. I was more than happy with the overall final animation, however with more time it could of been a lot better.