Bat Biped & Weighting

The bat will also have animated scenes, therefore Biped and weighting is essential.

The bat is by far the most difficult biped to model - positioning the arms and finger along the wings took a fair bit of time getting use to how the arm structure rotates and allows movement. Eventually aligning the biped within the model was easy with appropriate adjustments.

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Weighting

To ensure any movement of the wings or head didnt stretch or pull areas of the model that were not necessary I needed to weight the skin properly to the biped using the skin modifier and weight tool.

So far the Bat model will not need to be animated extensively - meaning only average amounts of weighting will need to be configured, mostly areas affecting the wing section and the head / neck.

This took some time getting used to how the arms moved with this particular biped as adjustments were needed to be made throughout the weighting process to order to produce a fairly clean skin.

Fox Biped and Weighting

In order to animate my Fox - I will need to add a biped the to the model, along with suiatble weighting of the joints to get a realistic movement effect.

I started off by creating a new biped through.. Create > Systems > Biped. Then rotating the skeleton to a horizontal position. Next using "Figure Mode" in the motion rollout, I positioned the arms and legs to fit inside the model.

*Hot Tip - freezing the model prevents accidental movement when attempting to align the Biped and prevent the model from being selected.

This is a fairly simple process and can be done in a short space of time if done correctly.

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Weighting

The fox model required fairly extensive weighting to simulate clean movement of the joints. What makes this type of model particularly difficult to skin properly is the fact that mistakes can easily be seen through small movements and the structure of the skeleton affects a large number of smaller section of each leg.

Testing consistently after small sections were weighted was the best approach to this task - eventually I was able to weight the model to a standard that allows the model to look very realistic with the right use of lighting.

The fact that I needed to keep going back over the skinning process to correct errors has allowed me to become quite proficient using the weight tool and blending the vertices.

Fox Texturing

I used a UVW map to add a texture to my fox.



This by far one of the trickiest parts of modelling - I attempted this last year with other models and found it very difficult to prevent cracks appearing in the texture. Fortunetly the outcome of this model's texture wasnt too bad, with minimal cracks, hopefully cannot be seen in the animation!

Fox Modelling part 2.

To continue with the modelling of my fox I will now be creating the body.

Using a previous techinique, I created the body shape using a plane and extruding the edges. Next the plane was converted into an editable poly, to give it it's bulk using the extrude tool.

A symmetry modifier was then applied to the model and the body aligned correctly with the head. Now comes the attachment to the head, I was extremely surprised with how easy this was to do using the bridge tool after selecting the polygons at the back of the head and the top of the body. looking back now this would have saved time on my human model by using this technique to attach the head. (lesson learnt!)

Finished Model.

Fox Modelling part 1.

The last character in my animation will be a fox - This will require a biped added at a later date to simulate a walk sequence.



To begin - I created a sphere in the left viewport with a setting of 8 segments, this will be used as a base to model the head from. Next the sphere was converted into an editable polygon - this allows us to further model the shape of the head to suit our needs. To create the 'nosel' for my fox, I used the 'bevel tool' on the front two polygons, carefully adjusting the settings to get the desired shape as appropriate. The mouth was modelled by using the cut tool to create an additional edge to which we can extrude from to make the bottom jaw.

The next part was create some ears for my fox - I will only be creating one ear as a symmetry modifier will be applied to the head when the features are finished. To do this I used the 'inset' tool and selected one of the top polygons to create the ear from, by dragging the polygon to from two shapes, a square and a triangle. These were then extruded from the base of the head to form the ear.

The eye was created using the same method - except the extrusion was into the head not away from it! A symmetry modifier was then applied when half the polygons were deleted to get a clean head design for the model as the can see in the image above. Amd the end result..

Human Modelling - Final

To give my model its unique look - I made some alterations to the nose and gave my model sunglasses and hair:

The nose was extended further from the face in an attempt to add the wallace and gromit theme along with simple hair created by yet again extruding the polygons and slitghly reshaping them.

The most challenging part was create the sunglasses - which was done by carefully copying a polygon away from the eye socket and extruding the edges to stretch around the face.

Finalling, the head was attached to the body of my body by scaling the head size down to match the body, then using the polygon create tool to create a new neck:

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Modelling the Hands

After finding a great reference image online - I create a plane on the image and extruded the edges to cover the shape of the hand; the same technique used previously. I then added a slight curve to the outside of each finger and added a symmetry modifier to complete the hand.

This was then attached to the wrists of the arms using the weld tool on each vertex.

Modelling a Human part 3.

With the facial features complete - the remaining task was to finish covering the face with polygons - this was a simple task using the extrude tool on the edges of the polygons, however careful positioning was needed to get a good effect.

Again it is extremely important to note how the polygons look in the side viewport to get the curved effecton the face. This needsto be checked whenever a polygon is created on the outside sections.

These images show the progression of polygons being created to cover the front of the head, again keeping the same technique.

Once the entire head was covered in polygons the end result can be seen here: