Much falling out of chair

This is now my desktop background.
I watched "Bolt," from Disney Animation studios recently, as it is a whole movie of a 3d animated puppy. Jen was right about getting expression from the eyebrows: they need a lot of play in the model. Anyway I really liked most of the movie; though some parts were over the top cheese and the story was very predictable the characters were still likeable and the situations they got in amusing. Like this one, which casued me to fall out of my chair laughing, rewind twice, then stick the DVD in my computer to get this Screen shot.
OMFGosh and Golly Jeepers it's so cute and funny and... sigh. Yeah, did I mention that I turned 25 this April?

From tutorial land...

Ok, I should be doing tutorials on skinning and rigging.. but there were really good lessons in this one.
Like working with the smoothed poly mesh (hit number 3) not the blocky one; sliding edge loops, inserting edge loops, extruding multiple faces for fingers and toes, working one one object with the move command set to mirror the world (much like having a copied instance, but it's really all one object).
For my own reference I stopped on page 202.
For your information skinning begins on 220, and the pages are big on pictures and small on text.

Suitable halloween decor

My first skeleton. I have no idea what is good and what is bad about it, but hey it's a start.
And yes maybe I should have simply skinned this puppy (heh heh) first, as I'm more famililar with that process, but oh well.

What? Review Day?

Smooth is 7,000 tris, Blocky is 1,700.
I know I need to :
Add a mouth, add toes.
Find a final level of Detail.
Skin/fur.
Rig.

But I'm not sure how; more book work!

Blocky and smoothed versions of what the puppy. I added eye orbs.

I realize that I don't really know what to do at this point. My feeling is that I'm getting close to the level of detail; if it's going to be cartoony and/ or covered in fur. Ironicly, if it's going to be real cartoony, I'll have to change things like the legs and ears and general size...

Anyway, time to look at more tutorials.

And add a mouth, when I figure out how.

Fatigued...

Can you see the difference from another hour or so's work? I don't know if I can, I can't see the other version...
That's all for tonight.

[edit] Ok, looking at the renders below, yes this is looking better, and I'm feeling better. The shape of the head is coming a long well, now for the rest of it...

I really should take a sculpture class if I'm going to do this a lot...

So far,

hour and a half's work. Trying very hard to not cut in more detail. Bad thing is that I'm sculpting from memory; I looked at a lot of Corgi pictures earlier in the term but not that many. On the other hand the detail is very general, and I'm just going from 'block' to 'roundish block'.


This last one is rendered after quickly hitting 'smooth polygon,' and is for Bridget.

Time to dust off the saddle

I've been gone about 2 weeks now from the lab and this project. It feels like longer; I've been working as the Technical director of Rogue Valley Opera's "La Boheme," the only opera produced this year between Eugene and Sacramento. It was a good show, for an opera. And it paid pretty well. In a lump sum that I'm faintly tempted to splurge on computer parts or Maya for my home...
But not yet, must feed self first.

Anyway.
There's half of week 7 left, and by week 11 I'd hoped to have a working model rigged and ready for animation. If I knew what I was doing I'm sure that would be possible. But I've spent my time using my degree instead of learning new stuff, so I've fallen behind. So a little triage. What's my goal?

Finish model, skin and hair model. Model set. By week 10. week 11 trying to rig. Because it's my first one I'm guessing I'll have to do the model over when I get to rigging, so a draft model is my goal. The fur should be pretty reasonable to adapt if it's a different shell.

So, let's draft this puppy. literally. I crack myself up.