Rigging Nod...

I'm currently in the process of finishing rigging up my character nod the ninja. This has taken way longer then it should have and has given me real problems because of the odd nature of nods body shape. So far i have just used the original biped and made the pelvis much wider and shorter and generally tried to fit the skeleton neatly inside my characters mesh. Ive gone through the process of skinning him and am currently trying to neaten up the envelopes so that his body parts move correctly with the biped attached... :S

In the end i haven't bothered using the biped for nod as it created far to many problems in the animating stage. Basically i couldn't get the skin to cover the biped properly and it kept getting left behind and having very odd effects on the overall model. So i have decided to use alternative techniques and not have him walking in a lot of the scenes...

Ready to Start animating:

Here's the envirroment for the animation with all the models present. This is a quick render with the skylight and omni light as mentioned earlier. the postioning of the models is just for the snap shot obviously they will be laid out for the camera angles and lighting when ready to render the animation. Fingers crossed for the animation... :s

Adding materials to objects

Table texture:

Water melon jpeg:

Adding table material:

The sword had a glossiness map and reflection map added to it to gave it a metalic look in the render. The water melon and the table both had textures gathered off the internet which where modified in photoshop and then applied to the objects in max with the use of the UVW map modifier. The breeze blocks were materialed the same way as the two above but a bump map was added to give the material more of a rough texture as it is meant to be concrete.

I then added a skylight and omni light for the still render which worked well with the material maps and will give a representation of the light used in the animation.

Other modeling for scene's

All models created:


model's being created



Once nod the ninja had been created i then started making the rest of the props and models needed from the story board. The first item to be made was a sword which was actually a tutorial off the web which i foillowed and got really good resuts. The sword is bacically plotted out in illustrutor and then extruded and shaped in max using the edit poly tool. After that i then created a table which is fairly simple and consisted if a rectangled shaped apropriatly and then two cyclinders placed underneath. its a fairly simple model but looks really good once the materials where added to it.


Then a water melon and concrete blocks where modelled which were very simple to create but what makes them is the materials used. i added a preset plant coz it just makes the back drop more interesting and vibrant.

Story board explained:

Storyboard

Nod the ninja animation (60 seconds)

Scene 1

Titles-Nod the ninja by matthew menzies in 3d text or 2d not sure yet.

Scene 2

Nod the ninja asleep on a plain white floor

Scene 3

Nod the ninja waking up and looking at the block he has to break with his ninja skills.

Scene 4

Nod not breaking the brick and then falling over from the impact

Scene 5

Nod the ninja picking up his sword and getting ready to cut the watermelon on the table.

Scene 6

Nod the ninja-loosing grip of his sword and it flying behind him into the distance.

Scene 7

Nod the ninja then getting sleepy and falling asleep on the floor

Scene 8

Nod the ninja sleeping while credits roll and then finish animation.

Adding materials to nod...

Here is the material and rendering stages of Nod's creation. Firstly i just added the variuos colour materials by highlighting the areas with the polygons and picking a material and draggin it over the desired area. The top image is rendered using the skylight above and a omni in front to give the character more depth and shadow.

Modeling Nod the ninja continued...

Here i have modelled the head which was a simple spere and then i used the poly modifier to extrude -5 on the front to create the face indent on the nod's head. This works really well as later i will apply the skin tone to that part with the black eyes.

Modeling Nod the ninja

Here i have started modeling nod the ninja, i used the basic box modeling technique to do his body using the poly modifer and extruding the various parts of him. i then decided to keep his legs and feet fairly short like the illustration of him. its a lil diferent but i think so far its coming along nicely.

New character: Nod the ninja

Here is my illustration of my latest character his name is Nod the ninja. Im gonna have a crack at modeling him in 3ds max coz i think he will make a great character for a children's animation. the reason he is called nod is because he is gonna be a really lazy and clumsy character, the polar opposite from what a ninja stereotype is perceived as.

Character development

After sitting down with jo and discussing my character in more detail i have decided to have a go at modeling another character. I was thinking of modeling a ninja character i made in illustrator many months ago because i think he will make a great character for an animation. Im still gonna keep my robot in wait if this doesn't turn out very well, we will just have to wait and see.