Ronnie Leah, BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts, UCA Rochester.

 Today I blended the upper and lower body of the Cyberpunk characters skin weights. Since the characters hands were slightly different from Jetpack Jones, it forced me to make my own decisions on what edges should blend together. This was good as it allowed me to apply the knowledge that I had learnt from the video and made me more confident in skinning. After completing the hand on my own, I decided to try and do the rest of the upper body without using the video. I found for the most part everything was simple to do, apart from when it came to the shoulders as my characters shoulders are made up of loads of different cubes. This meant selecting the precise edge I wanted hard. I managed to get the arms to look more natural in their movement moving in a single direction, however if its moved in multiple directions at once the geometry can become muddled.  I decided to move on to the legs and hope that this can be fixed by using corrective blend shapes. 

 Today I began skinning the Cyberpunk character. I used the same processes as before and tried to remember each step on my own without using the video. The character is built in a very similar way to the Samurai, however I still had to spend time fitting the skeleton to its shape.  Once that was done I combined the geometry with the skeleton and completed the skin weighting. 

 Today I continued with the upper body skinning, using the Jetpack Jones video tutorials as a guide.  I started by skinning the characters hand. I then had to skin the rest of the fingers on my own after the tutorial does one of the fingesrs. this helped me to rememeber the process I then moved on to the arm. I had to make the appropriate changes for my own character as the arms were different from Jetpack Jones.  Unfortunately my characters arms don't quite line up on either side, meaning they are not symmetrical. This meant simply mirroring the skin weights messed up the whole of the arm, to the point that it was just easier to skin the arm again. I managed to remember a lot of the process when it came to the hand. I also had additional challenges with the hand as it has the outer detail, however I managed to work out how to cleanly bend the fingers.   I also completed the tutorial for skinning the characters legs.  I managed to complete the skinning tuto...

 After completing the base rig with the controls for both characters, I realized that in the Jetpack Jones tutorials the tutor adds controls to the rig after the skinning process. I would be unable to follow the tutorial if I did not do it this way. I firstly tried to simply delete away the controls but found that the rig was far too big and out of proportions of my character to be used. I decided to instead just start with a new a fresh rig, modelled after the one seen within the Jetpack Jones tutorial, excluding the ribbon spine.  I also added in the additional joints to the arms and legs so that when the wrist of foot joint rotated, the joint above would also rotate in a natural way.  Once this was done I was then able to follow along with the tutorial.  When it came to skinning the upper half of the model, I found that the finger joints were out of line with the model. This meant I had to go back a save file and readjust the position of the joints. This was annoy...

 Within the animation the Japanese Palace gets set on fire and so I made a burnt version. I tried adding a glowing fire texture in the windows however this never really showed in the render. I will so the rest of the effects in editing and rendering. So far I feel this version is a good start and I wanted it to be a darker version so it is disguised a bit in the fog. I do however prefer the original textured version and so want to show that off in the animation before the realization that the palace is on fire.  I really like the melted effect I was able to create on the tiles to really sell the idea that the palace is on fire. 

 Today I UV'd and textured the Shinto Shrine in Substance painter. This was a simple process as the model is low poly as it is a background model.  I originally made the black parts around the top and base metal, however felt that this made the Shinto shrine look too new. As well as this the Shinto shrine is meant to represent nature and I found online they are mainly constructed of wood. I then changed the material to be the same as the red parts of the model and found it to fit much better with the theme.  

 Today I experimented with different textures within substance painter until I found a combination I liked for the palace.  As the original piece of concept art had no colour to it, it was left up to the texturing phase to decide what the actual palace would look like. Although I already had an idea of the sort of colours I wanted to include, I gathered reference images online to be certain it matched the theme of traditional Japanese Palaces.  Below is a closer look of the final textures of the Palace. It is important that it reflects the traditional look of a Japanese palace so I put it against a neon background, which represents the Cyberpunk world. I really like how the building has come together and feel it contrast nicely against the background. All I need to do now is fix some of the UV's on the rooftops of the building.  I feel this is a believable environment for my character to have been brought up in. All I need to do now is figure out how I'm going to rep...