Finals

Well...it's half way through Finals week and I haven't started ripping my hair out yet. I've already finished my paper for one class, and took 2 exams. Lastly, I have my final project in Advanced 3D Graphics. We had to create a character model. You start with just a simple box and you mold the thing until it looks like a character. Once you have the character modeled, you create the bones inside the character. It gets really confusing at this part. You have to make sure that the bones are the right size, located at the right places, etc. The next step is to rig the bones. That is actually tougher than it sounds. You have to make sure that things are linked properly and that everything bends the right way and in the right direction. Lastly, you skin the character. What that means is like when you move your elbow, the back of your elbow stretches and the inside of your elbow shrinks. You skin the character so all the skin around the joints stretch and shrink in the right places. Once you have all that working correctly, you get to animate the character and make it do some interesting things. For our final project, we have to animate the character in a scene. My character walks across stage (which a walk cycle...not easy!!), sits down at a piano and plays twinkle twinkle little star. It was a challenge to get the fingers to actually play the right notes and the right time, but I managed. I don't have the final video rendered out yet, but the minute I do, I'll add it to my blog for you guys to see.

I can show you my final character model that I created tho. This is an elf that I created. It started off as a box, and you can kinda see where that was at. You change the box so that it has many faces and then you start pulling things out and reshaping things. The hardest thing about my creating my character was probably getting the nose to look right, the mouth, and the chin. Every time I would pull out the chin the mouth would get distorted and I would get discouraged; so I stopped tying to pull out the chin. I'm pretty satisfied with the results. It was actually one of the easier projects I've worked on.

I will add my final animation once I have it completed. Have a great Christmas break everyone!!!