Link Project 010

Sorry for posting later than I said I would. Had to do a lot more than I thought.
So like I said before, the rig is pretty much finished. All I need to do is incorporate the eyebrows and hair into the rig, and then create the face controls. Once that is done I can do a refined skinning and he should be ready to go.
I ended up finding a video on youtube that helped me figure out what I needed to do to get a working fk/ik spine. Here is the video link if you are interested. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhGCGe1dLxA
After watching the video, I scrapped my old setup and controls and created new ones based off the tutorial. It was actually pretty easy incorporating the spine once it was finished because I had everything setup from when I previously tried to create the fk/ik spine.
My rigs right arm is still a little janky so I have to look into that and I also need to make the spine work properly with the master control. Other than that everything is looking good.
Here is a little video I made just testing the rig with a rough skin bind.

Thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to my next post.

Link Project 009

Will be posting update later tonight/tomorrow morning. Pretty much got rig working properly now. FK/IK spine is now fully working, WOOOO! I couldn't have done it without a youtube tutorial that I found online though. I will go into detail later. I created a very rough skin bind for the rig and plan to record an animation test that I will post with the full update.

Hope you look forward to it.

Link Project 008

I have now finished most textures for link. All I have left for textures is to create specular/reflection maps and tweak shaders. Here is my latest render.

Still might tweak the saturation of the boots and the clothing isn't final. Just thought I would add some color to the low res meshes. Also not sure if I will leave the hair one solid color or paint a texture for it. I feel like leaving it solid fits the style. What do you think?

Now that I have pretty much finished the textures I can now go back and finish up the rig. Once the rig is complete I can start testing simulations. 

Not that big of an update, would like to have worked more on Link but some things came up this week. For example, my website is currently down and I had to create a temporary one. If you want to check it out here is the link:

http://jesusmundo.weebly.com/

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.

Link Project 007

Just a quick post with a turnaround of my Link model so far. Not the best quality, but it gets the job done.

Link Project 006

So at this point, I believe I started creating the hair. I originally planned to simulate hair using Maya's hair system. I tried creating the hair in Zbrush but I couldn't get the volume that I wanted the hair to have. Instead I ended up creating curves in Maya that I would use to create the hair. This was a very long and tedious task and to be honest, it drained my enthusiasm for the project.
So I decided to take a "quick" break from it so I wouldn't get burned out. I thought I could quickly create a SSS (sub-surface scattering) piece (my female portrait project) and put it on my reel. Turned out that the piece took a lot longer than expected. But I think it was for the better. I learned a lot while working on it and it also got me motivated again. With that project finished I came back to this one and made some corrections to my model.
Some of the advice I got from my friend for the clothing was to create a single low poly mesh to base my simulation off of. With that in mind, my problem areas were the belt area and the pants. The belt area would be hard to simulate if I was using one mesh for the tunic so I decided to split it in half.
I also originally had the pants as a separate mesh to simulate over Link's legs. His "pants" are actually tights, so there was no point in simulating them, instead I could just use them as his legs. So I removed Link's legs and merged his pants as his legs. 
Lastly I also decided that the realistic simulated hair wasn't fitting the stylized look. Especially since he didn't have realistic eyebrows. So I refined the block in hair mesh that I made and decided to use that. So far the hair has been very troublesome but I'm getting closer to a result I'm happy with.
For now, here are some progress images.

That's about all for now. I do have one more thing I will be uploading later due to my internet being rather poor lately. This post is pretty close to my current progress. By my next post I should be all caught up.

Until then, thank you for reading and I hope you look forward to my next post.

Link Project 005

As promised here are some screenshots of the rig.

It's not super fancy but it will get the job done. I also thought I would make it a little interesting by creating a master control and a help guide that were Legend of Zelda themed. When I finish this project I plan the also create a real time version that I can give to anyone who would like a copy. I can't promise you that it will be the best rig you've ever used but it's something to play with.

The rig isn't finished yet but it's close. I created fk/ik arms, legs, and a spine. I wanted to test creating a fk/ik spine because in my rigging experience I always seem to have to use a fk spine. The ik spine seems to break whenever it gets too far away from the master control and I still haven't figured out how to fix it. I still have some bugs to work out with the fk/ik spine switch too but so far the fk spine is working.

Next time I will show you the corrections I made to the model and the final sculpt. Also, I plan on posting weekly that way I can have more substance to my post. I think I will try to get a post up every Saturday from now on. So until then, thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to my next post. 

Link Project 004

Hello everyone, sorry for the long absence. Something came up that required my full attention but thankfully I believe the crisis has been averted.

Anyway, I didn't mean for the last post to be so dramatic. Hopefully you didn't think because I got stuck on simulating the clothing that I gave up. No, luckily I have some really talented and good friends who can help me when I get stuck. I simply sent a message and a work file to a friend familiar with simulating clothing and he helped me work it out. Once again, thanks for the help Bugi.

Once I figured out what I needed to do I reset myself and started thinking about different ways I could setup the clothing. I also needed to setup a rig in order to test if the cloth simulation was working properly or not. So I started setting up my base rig with the clothing in mind.

That's all for now, sorry I don't have any W.I.P. pictures for this post but I will have some next time. Now that I have everything taken care of I should be able to get back to regular post. Till then, thank you for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.