Cave Johnson in the Flesh!

[Dazhbog]

Well, not his flesh. More Cave Johnson stuck in Generic_Maya_Dude_Rig_01. Still!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7yBkEBW8qE

Our most recent animation project, with only the fingers and facial features left to actually work on.

[Aergis]

Hah! Nice work! How long did it take?
Not to derail your thread, but I didn't think it was worth making my own. But now that were talking 3d... I just finished up a highpoly model competition over at eat3d. Didn't come out as good as I hoped, but of course I picked a tank...







Some of the cylinder shapes came out janky because I couldn't fit 18mil poly onto my GPU Vram and I wanted to use Octane to render it, which is 100% GPU ram reliant. So I had to drop the subd from 4 to 2 so you can completely see some faceting in places. It's a shame, can't wait till 6Gb video cards that don't cost $5,000, or some way to use my 16Gb machine ram with the processing power of the GPU...

[laterna]

Did you use any real examples to base your tank on aergis? Some stuff seem odd

[Flex]

Mine sweeper APC tim burton era batmobile?

[Aergis]

Maybe I should have said "tanklike thing".
It was from this piece of concept art which I really liked. And I had to make up the back and parts of the opposite sides, which I did look at real tanks for, but didn't duplicate an actual model. More took parts that looked "cool" built them up. And I put a 50 cal instead of the space gun the concept has, mostly because from that one shot I couldn't tell how it was supposed to work/look...

[Dazhbog]

Hah! Nice work! How long did it take?

You terrible derailer type person!

The animation's taken, oh... maybe 15-16 hours of worktime so far. Animation is tricky!

[laterna]

Ah makes sence, just some things I noticed

The chains in the back have no use on a tank, hence they wouldn't be there, also no tank has compartments that open from the outside you had some shelf/drawer kind of thing on the side of the tank, unless thats just a piece of metal to hoist yourself up?

Otherwise, I think it looks stunning

[Aergis]

The chains were from this reference, which I assumed was to help protect some of the underworkings there but wouldn't allow for solid plating. That seemed similar to the situation I had on the back as well so I used them there.





And yes, they definately are not drawers. There's no way to get into the vehicle except the hatch on the top, so I assumed people would like a ladder rung to help climb the back.

[Aergis]

You terrible derailer type person!

The animation's taken, oh... maybe 15-16 hours of worktime so far. Animation is tricky!

Yeah, I'm not looking forward to it... especially character animation... Ug.

[Dazhbog]

You terrible derailer type person!

The animation's taken, oh... maybe 15-16 hours of worktime so far. Animation is tricky!

Yeah, I'm not looking forward to it... especially character animation... Ug.

We have an absolutely brilliant instructor, and I'm finding I have something of a knack for it. Take my advice, start with the CoG control, do that first without touching anything, then move outward from there. It makes for a MUCH better final product. The other big piece of advice we got is to always slow in/slow out curves; for example, take Translate X versus time (frames) going from zero to some value X. The default curve that Maya (and I assume other programs) drops between the two points is something like a sine curve, but taking a point two thirds along and moving it back to the half way point (creating a rapid increase in value, followed by a shallower increase towards the final peak) is a much more natural curve.

Assuming you're not animating robots, of course.

[Dazhbog]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvsYXHU-gg8

He speaks!

[Invisusira]

Looking good! Very expressive face, I like it. (...perhaps a bit TOO expressive in the first half, the eyebrows are kinda all over)

[Arnock]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvsYXHU-gg8

He speaks!

Very well done, I like the expressiveness of the eyes, particularly the eyebrows. The mouth might need a little work though.

[Dazhbog]

Yes, it does; I never got around to making his lips move, and his mouth is too jerky as it currently stands. I'll revisit it soon, meanwhile we're busy with a new project, that I'm rather behind on.

[Aergis]

Very nice, but yeah I agree the eyebrows especially move a bit too much. Fantastic work!