Sultans lecture the second

Tuesday 12th May

this afternoon we had another lecture from the legend that is Sultan. An indepth lecture lasting 4 hours, Sultan discussed ways of rigging the leg as well as spine. Alhtough i have rigged a character before and take a keen interest in this area within production, Sultan was able to show much more time saving techniques of creating controls such as the reverse foot. His methods of grouping joints also solved joint orientation issues, something that i had problems with last term. Sultan also introduced methods of grouping joints to controls which would mean there was less chance of the rig being moved, messing up and therefore preventing decent animation.

That afternoon i worked on modeling the character of John. Heres some images of my progress so far:

using old geometry from last terms project, now adjusted accordingly to meet the new model of john. Johns arms and feet are very VERY exaggerated in length

next, to create the face ive started using nurbs curves in order to get the smooth look for john...the mouth requires many more isopalms to give definition and enough geometry for the blend shapes.
i get a rough shape with the curves then find it much easier to convert into polys and start cutting into to get the shape....stops any isopalms overlapping, the shape becoming confused. As you can see, I'm still working in halves here ready to have the model mirrored over for symmetry. 

Where we at schedule wise...here num skull!
still early days in terms of modelling, but Im quite confident we can get this task complete quite swiftly in order to move onto the next stage of the pipeline. My ultimate goal is to NOT have the animation time suffer but i know we have a lot further to go before were onto that stage yet. Dan will need to finish the environment soon in order to begin modeling benny and i will need to be thinking two steps ahead so we limit the amount of potential problems. Im thinking of completing a few rig tests etc when the models are further along so they're planned and ready in order for us to meet this schedules tight deadlines.