Mesh and Bones

The first thing I did this week was make some arms for my character. Then I put some new materials on the objects in the scene so that it wasn't just purple everywhere. Using the bone tool I made a custom skeleton for my character so that I could start animating him. The actual animating part never happened because I spent the last two days of this week having some trouble with both the Physique and Skin modifiers.

Eye See You

This week I worked on designing a character, and this is what I came up with, so far. I started with a simple sphere with an eye ball texture applied to it and then I modeled an eyelid around it so that it did not look as creepy as it did. Then using the reference image above I modeled a pair of legs for my character. Next week I will either make him a four legged creature or I will model a pair of arms. Which ever I choose I will then start rigging him up for animating.

I had another little side project that I worked on at the beginning of this week, while I thought of different character ideas. I messed around with MassFX, a rigid body physics tool new to 3ds Max 2012. I create a shattering mirror effect in which a ball is thrown at a mirror. The mirror then proceds to breaks and falls to pieces and the ball bounces away.

Rigging and More

This week I learned some basic biped character rigging, which was used in the top video. The stick figure man was made in about 5 minute just as a means of having something to rig up. Then I spent some time using the Skin modifier to connect to the biped bones to the stick figure mesh. When I got that setup how I wanted it I started animating him and putting him into different poses. Finally I choose to render out the scene of him walking across a floor and then up some stairs.

The second video, of a liquid being poured into a glass cup, was a little side project of mine this week. The glass cup is a simple cylinder with the center cut out of it. The liquid was made using the super spray particle system. In order to get the liquid to interact with and fill up the cup I used the Gravity tool and several UDeflectors.

MineCastle is Finished

This week I spent my time finalizing my castle presentation. I rendered out all the videos in 3ds max and then spent some time putting it all together in Adobe Premier. This is the first of many projects, and I had an abundance of fun make it, and I am looking forward to the next one.