Week 18: Winter Break Update

This is a week 18 update as I took a break from working on An Toll Dubh on week 17!

It has been an interesting week, easing back into work after taking a bit of a break to move home at the end of the semester! I've been a bit drained from working on animations 24/7 for An Toll Dubh and my other capstone project (which is making animations for characters in a game) for the past few weeks, so this week I decided to take care of some polish items that fell to the wayside the past few weeks in favor of creating layouts.

For one, I revisited the Wolf to adjust the rig around the jaw, as in layouts I noticed that placement was a little off. I also added a mouth bag and teeth to the Wolf! The mouth bag was planned to be added, but since the original wolf mesh was made for segmented rigging, it wasn't a high priority. It was definitely a bit of a challenge making teeth for a creature that is largely wolf-like but adjusting it to make the wolf seem more like a primordial/fantastical creature, but I think it worked out rather well!

I also spent some time updating the texturing on the wolf! I wasn't quite happy with how the old textures looked, so I wound up playing around in Substance Painter more to give the textures a bit more detail/cleanup! They're not quite 100% done as I might still play around with them a bit later, but they're much closer to the look I want now. They also still don't have the more painterly/sketchy look I want, but that'll be applied with shaders later on.

I've also been working on updating Arne's rig and textures! Arne's previous rig was a good basis and properly weighted, but it needed some additional helper rigs for his belts/accessories in order for them to deform properly and to provide more room for them to be adjusted with more extreme poses. These were pretty simple to set up, as they just involved using a proxy surface and clusters to control the belt deformations, along with some constraining to the main rig. I'll likely do a second pass of these rigs to try and fix some of the lagging issues, but they work much better now and are a major upgrade on the basic weight painting.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/20f116_797852f48a514529bb51e2643cc0b386/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Arne's (skin) textures have also been improved- I hadn't textured skin before so his original textures made him look a bit dead, but after doing some studies and going back over his textures in Substance Painter, he looks much more lively and his texture is much better than before! I'm very pleased I took the time to play around with him in Substance Painter more; I feel much more confident with it and I've developed a pretty efficient workflow for character texturing!

The next week is, unfortunately, busier for me since I'm traveling but I'm going to see about working on editing Signe's textures and rig in the time I do have, and potentially polishing up Arne's helper rigs as well!