crushed clown causes calamity at the circus!!!

on friday afternoon...around tea time, the body of john the clown was found near his home near the entrance of the travelling circus.

john (age unidentified) was said to be feared by children and his case is almost certainly being treated as death by gigantic shoe crushing...ironically from one of his own shoes which slipped off and crushed him whilst he was painting minature models of children being shot out of a miniture model of a cannon.

john had no next of kin to comment on this matter but circus ring master the amazing grigsby said "its a terrible terrible loss.....were now looking for new applicants"

john will be buried in the traditional manner of clowns: by allowing locals to throw custard pies at his body and then being driven off in the worlds smallest funeral car...

ok...back to normality. Heres a look at John's UV texture window.

heres a test of the textures on the model (yes im aware the wireframes on there...its for my guidance):

yeah, it became clear that the textures...weren't all that clear. Infact...the resolution was poor....VERY poor. I will be the first to put up my hands and admit im NOT a texture artist, i know very little about it and was creating the textures without knowledge of resolution and the image size of my snapshot...all this culminated towards a very POOR outcome....you hear me...POOR!

it will all have to be redone...annoying BUT necessary if we want these models to look quality.

so after discovering the image resolution was a problem, the textures were still applying blurry like your old nan's vision...even with the filter type off....THEN the almighty discovery. I split up the arms onto individual UV snapshots...i can get away with this as the geometry is all separate....note for the future when modeling.

So heres the new UV snapshot

updates to that model:already the quality of the textures is mmmmmuuuuch better...you no longer feel like you have cataracts when looking at them. Areas that require cloning/heal brush tool in maya where i had adjust the painted texture to fit the model. 

darn trouser leg!

shoe stretching....possibly need re UVing.

edge of the texture showing! seam is less important as we wont see the back of the character but i will try to rectify this as well. 

heres the wonderful difference to the resolution...this is still without bump at the moment...more updates to come.

making of: the texture has to be offset twice, horizontally and vertically so that it runs seamlessly and can be tiled instead of resized to minimize any resolution loss. The lines are then painted over using the clone stamp and healing tool so the texture is seamless...perfecto!

how it stands...what a beautiful clown :P

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)