Part 2: Bones, Rigging, and Animation

The Model

The second week of KIT207 involved the modelling, rigging, and animation of a character. Instead of doing something reasonable and simple, I spent quite a long time creating this monstrosity. I call him EyeDude.

I don't know where I got the inspiration from, nor do I want to know, I just started it and then kept going. I more or less loop cut, extruded, and subdivided a cube until i got a workable model, which took a few tries to get right. 

The material only uses a single texture as diffuse, specular, and bump maps. This was painted directly onto the model via the texture paint mode. The ribs and other exposed bone looks somewhat better when the bump map expresses it rather than indents it as appears in the renders, however it was a nightmare to manipulate the shader inputs to invert the eye veins, which look terrible when indented, so the compromise had to be made.

The specular/roughness map combined with the bump mapping added an immense amount of detail despite the base texture being quite rudimentary. I set up the specular map shader to make the white bones and eye to be highly reflective while the red flesh is fairly matt. 

The Animations

Moving forward, I rigged up the model and did the animations. 

The idle pose was fairly basic. Other than the idle breathing, I also made the eye jump around erratically to add some more creepy factor to him. 

The walking animation isn't entirely perfect, and has a mild loop inconsistency, but I think it turned out alright. I tried to give it a bit of bounce but it didn't really come through much. I could have spent forever on it, so settled for good enough. 

The wave animation was fairly straightforward to do by this point. I should have probably put one more wave into it, since this looks more like he's pointing skyward, but it translates well enough. 

To cap things off, I did a few transparent renders, mainly to create a Discord emoji, but I got a few bonus renders out of it, and learned a bit more about Blender's rendering suite.

Overall, a lot of work but all enjoyable, and I'm quite happy with the outcome