Cult of Calcium

So we're going to be using bones as a lot of our base martial, which means we need to model lots and lots and lots of bones.Any kind of bones, including limbs and skulls. I'm mainly gonna do kind weird looking skulls to model, such as snapping turtles, snakes, and fish. And maybe some other weird ones, like hippos.

Turns out bones are actually pretty damn hard to model. There are so many weird little things to model in and out, ugh.

But anyway, I've managed to get the bulk of the turtle skull finished, just have to screw around with the little fidgety bits. Then I have around six more to do then I have to do all the miscellaneous bones. Yay.

Bits and bobs

 

Got an awesome post to help with World Building from biology to government and culture creation. Really helpful stuff if you wanna make your own universe.

nCloth

So we were learning about cloth simulation, creating nCloth out of planes and having it interact with a pole and sphere which were passive colliders.

Namely we screwed about with a cape during the second class- making it remain attached to a character while they jumped and making the cape flow naturally.

Note to self- do not click Delete all type history since that removes the model's spine. :/ Totally forgot about that part, whoops.

In the next class we made a t-shirt (just duplicating the body and shaping it to fit) and attached it to the body while making said body a passive collider and the shirt into nCloth. We then made the body jump and started to screw about trying to make the shirt look...ya know, like fabric as the body jumped. Making ti stop trying to eat itself mid-jump, making it fall naturally, not stay bunched up or twisted around...

Managed to make it end up looking pretty good so I tried out with a dress. Yeah, that one crash and burned.


Here's a good site to learn more about nCloth and what the numerous doohickeys and whatnot alter the way the fabric interacts with surfaces and each other, most even have helpful videos next to the different interactions and settings.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

In class today one of the videos we watched was the Barrel Scene from the most recent Hobbit movie- Interesting thing about this is the fact it was one of the scenes first started on when production on the whole movie began and it was finished four weeks before The Hobbit was released on the big screen.

Hilariously enough apparently for the first three weeks they started on this scene the water simply rocketed up into the air. Most of the Hobbits/Dwarves in this scene were done on green screen with them flailing around in barrels then added in later with the water simulation.

On the subject of Smaug, the four artists assigned to him hand painted all the little fractals/patters of his scales. Every single scale on him was hand painted. Hell, I can barely paint a flower without making it look like bright vomit and getting bored outta my tree.



Though I'll never understand why the hell they made Benedict Cumberbatch the motion-capture for Smaug's movements;



It's hilarious to watch, but seriously??? It would have made more sense of they used Komodo Dragons or even iguanas than some lanky British dude.

Brief Intoduction

I'm a student at SIT and currently on my third and final year of studying the Bachelor of Digital Media, Animation Branch. I live on a farm, my favourite colour is purple and I have a pet Axolotl AKA a Mexican walking fish named Oxie.

I'm making this blog to track my progress with my assignments via posting material, tutorials I've learned from, animations I've found interesting, games, crap I've tried my own hand at and so on and so forth.

This is an incredibly lackadaisical introduction but I really don't know how the hell to blog other than posting angry rants against society or cute pictures of animals. I'll probably occasional post those as well as posts regarding my adventures in animation and my successes and failures in that field.