Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Here's Imrod in all his low poly glory.

I have always found it interesting how joint placement and alignment are at odds with natural placement, your taught that you should keep your shoulder, elbow and wrist in line with each other and only bend one axis. Great and all but your actual shoulder socket joint is offset from your elbow so you have to go out slightly to get the elbow where its supposed to be.

And technically your elbow is almost perfectly between your wrist and shoulder, and yet if you take into account style and concept art you will almost never rig a stylized character with perfect human proportions  Yes I know they are stylized and its way more fun to rig a character that's catty wonkus than a perfectly symmetrical model. But I will admit it's so much easier to rig a symmetrical model, not that I am lazy or anything.

I am trying to get into the habit of not fixating on the models topology and just working with how it is when I get the model. I will be honest though sometimes I wish there was a way to snap my fingers and fix all the bad topology and no I am not insulting all you modelers out there, I highly respect what you guys do.

Back to my day.
Is there someone behind you?

HOLY CRAP WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!
...

What I'm working on and how cool I think they are.

So as I am in the unfortunate position were my skills as a TD are being underutilized by the industry, AKA I don't have a job in CG right now, so I am working on anything I can get my hands on. Currently I am working on two rigs.

I would like to again thank Mark Vick a.k.a Ritorian over at CGhub.com for this beauity

This is a farily low poly model with normal maps.

Na na na na na na na na na na BATMAN!

Ya I know shweet hunh.
Im almost finished with a base rig for this guy and I hope to get Marks permission to release this rig free on creative crash.

I'm working on a bataraang

And number 2. I just picked this up from Dmitry Parkin's site.

Some call him Imrod...

Game resolution model with normal and glow maps

I know its like candy from heaven to work with this stuff.

As with Batman I would like to release this rig.

Oh to be able to rig this stuff for a living... I can dream. If my dreams aren't answered I can always beg.

These are both amazing looking models and I hope my rigs at least do them a little justice.


Monday, October 29, 2012

Reinventing the wheel.

Morning TD fans, lets have a look into my thought process and my logic. I know like blood from a stone right.

    Now that I am a person who blogs I might as well go ape shit and post a bunch of stuff in the same day. Lets start with some of my thoughts about the term, reinventing the wheel.

    In my not so humble opinion you cannot reinvent something that is already at its apex you can only make it crappier. The wheel is, at its core functionality, already stripped down to a perfectly working system. Sure you can add rubber but its still a circle, its still a wheel, it still functions the same as every other wheel out there, just with rubber. My point is you can't reinvent the wheel, only upgrade the way it does its core function which is to roll. There we go, that's my logic when it comes to that expression. A useless argument in  the grand scheme of things but its still how I feel. Now on to scripts.

    Scripts are written for many reasons, from the need to automate a repetitive or tedious task to adding functionality that a software suite does not offer. Either way your ass is writing a script because the program just can't do it by itself. Now there are many scripts already written and available from websites like creative crash for you to use. However, you have probably run into this at some point were the script is either broken for some reason or does not work as you expected. Which ever reason this script does not work for you and this is were I say, okay fine I'm just going to re-write my own version of the script. I figure if they can do It so can I. So this brings us back to reinventing the wheel.

    My curse is I will fixate on finding a way to make something better, cleaner, faster and simpler. This is usually involves me figuring out the base effect I wanted and rebuilding from there. I do it with scripts I do it with rig setups. I know your not supposed to do it all the time but I guess the excuse is that I am creating my own style for my art of rigging. Unfortunately its usually a thankless process and I often hear, well why not use this setup its already a standard? Well to be honest a lot of the setups that are standard are out dated or have been in need upgrading to meet the updated software. 

  Either way I think I have spouted enough for this one. My next blog post will probably be me talking about the 30 some odd scripts I have created to speed up my rigging workflows.

   See you next time, same bat time, same bat channel.


Stop talking and just do it.

I am finally following my own advice and starting a blog. But Syn, you ask, why start a blog? Well, that's a good question little Timmy or Susie, so here is the best answer I can give.

I want to share my thoughts and exploits with everyone in hopes that somewhere, someone will find it interesting because personally I live for this shit.

Also for some reason I need to "network". Yes I know I used quotes, screw you grammar Nazis. I can't spell, I don't use grammar well at all, and punctuation can go spork itself. The only reason any of this is correct is thanks to the built in spell check so thank it for making this post not look like a three year old wiped his diaper on the keyboard.

So as for my debut to blogging goes lets wrap this up.

Here be dragons, all things CG specifically rigging, and limited access to that thing in my skull that is supposed to separate me from the apes and good thing it seems to be doing its job for the time being.