move and sew UV edges....move and sew UV edges...

its plain to me that UVing, although a skilled task, is a monotonous job which is taking me a lot longer than i thought...i have thank yous to make

YANIV..for your continual support and tutoring with this task of texturing and mapping, your expertise in this subject is much appreciated

MATT...for also your knowledge in this area and had to avoid getting into immense detail...also for helping to solve the painted cylindrical issue

JARED...for solving the matching textures issue with use of photoshops offset tool as stated "one of its only uses"

UVing

i can safely say that last project i did not enjoy the likes of UV mapping...mainly because i didnt understand exactly what i was doing. However i can say that my confidence is greatly improved after Sultan's lecture to find out i wasn't getting it completely wrong and whilst a long process, can be broken to into manageable chunks...sounds like an advert for bbc bitesize ARRGH

damage report!!! heres the updates of me laying out those old UVs:

Keeping up appearances: i've separated the UVs according to left and right of the model to keep things in order....makes sense

i will return soon with moooooore fantastic updates ya'll

pour dan

so after oogling pictures of john dan and i agreed on his scale and ive sent the file back over to dan so he can adjust bennys scale to this....it's good to finally see the character in the environment as its seen like 2 separate elements up until this point.

Im very pleased with Dans work on the benny model too, i think hes really managed to capture and maintain the element within my 2d concept :)

before....and after....giant clown vs wee clown :)

ok so with the characters scaled, its time to move onto UV mapping...heres where were at on the old schedule....
never UV'd a character before but im confident we can complete in the 5 days set aside for this area of the pipeline. This is my only o err area of weakness so far so if we can get through this aspect the other areas im confident we can meet on time in order to get to the acquired goal of ani-mani-nating. Were meeting deadlines ok but we really need to speed through in order to meet these other deadlines as ROA is fast approaching not to mention other unit deadlines with contextual studies and the dvd show-reel unit for dalli. 

attack of the giant clown!!!

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!! 

im so glad we checked the character sizes now rather than later..obviously Dan and i have been working to different scales which needs sorting so were ready to UV etc. 

some scale options...dan please give me your input on these...

modelling complete!!!

huzzar! took longer than initially scheduled as I took on both character but finally we can move onto the next stage of plotting the UVs. I hope the texturing to be by then end of this week so we can move onto rigging and skinning....this will require more of our time so we can get some top notch animation :)

Without further ado...heres John:

i feel happy with these outcomes. During the modelling stage, i have been refering to my expression sheets explicitly to make sure i had enough verts for all the different shapes when it comes to blend shapes. This is something i didnt do last time and it meant creating blend shapes was harder as the character was modelled without consideration of how it would then deform into different shapes.

currently were not doing too badly at meeting the schedule, though the next days are crucial for getting the benny model completed and starting to lay out the UVs of the characters, which neither me or dan have done before. There's only 5 days set aside for this, so we'll need to really push ourselves in order to meet this target so that the time for animating doesn't suffer any further. We can do it!!!

creases and seams

my model once mirrored had created a huge seam throughout which would certainly show once textured and rendered...its annoying and needed sorted.

i tried soften edges, merging all the verticies, setting normal angles, conforming...you name it, i tried it...

so it was in to college to find me some help in the form of ....

YANIV!!! a big thank you to him for spending a lot of time with me today sorting out the model. He managed to correct the issue by averaging the vertices, unfortunately this did mean that a lot of the shape was lost from the model BUT it meant i had to remodel parts...i just imported an old version and matched it up so to speed things up.

Very happy with this outcome now and UVing can begin!!!

heres some before and afters:

this is the pathetic annoyance of the whole matter....THIS CREASE aaaaaaah! 

yaniv tried normals > harden edge to roughen out the entire model
and then average verticies to smooth out the geometry. This model is with the old feet though as the down side of average verticies is that you loose some of your models shape. Since the shoes were as i wanted them, i simply hacked off his feet and combined the old ones to the model.  WERHEY! looking great john (big oversized thumbs up)

test blend

as previously mentioned, i wish to limit the amount of...mess ups. My last project resulted in a loss of blend shapes and foot attributes, and although im confident as to why this happened, i wished to test a few scenarios to rule out any other reasons why this may have occured.

with my john model, i duplicated it and then had 2 different setups

1. head and lower body geometry are NOT connected, blend shapes are made simply from the head and then the lower geometry is connected AFTERWARDS
2. head and lower body geometry are CONNECTED, blend shapes are made from this.

this was a good experiment as the second model seemed to work more effectivly than the first. im not sure whether my maya got confused bout two sets of characters in there, but once the geometry had been connected and verts merged seemed unable to create a new set of blend shapes.  I have read back through my book on rigging and the characters demonstrated seem fully connected and able to have multiple blend shapes so it shouldnt be an issue. it would be if further additions to the model were added. 

to push it one step further (as i say im really really trying to consider every potential reason why i suffered issue last time) i created a quick rig and bound it to the model. Again in both instances this meant that the rig could be manipulated as well 

overall, im confident which method to take now, and am reassured why i had the issues last term. As long as i don't confuse the models history by adding more edge loops etc to it then all blend shapes and attributes should work effectively.