Variation Skins for Generic Male Maya Rig

I am starting to work on some variations to the Kill Bill styled character. These will take two forms. The first will be hand drawn pen and ink; plenty of cross hatching, on water colour paper and scanned.

The other will be collage based. I want to do some thing using the old Spode Willow Plate patterns that were created near the University in the 1700's.

Spode Willow plate - 1700's

Spode Pottery Willow Pattern rough test

Then some collage pieces using old etchings from Piranesi...

Giovanni Piranesi etching rough test

...and any other interesting etchings I can find...

Etching of foliage test

Improved uv unwrapping / textures for the Kill Bill / Bruce Lee styled generic male character...

Improved uv unwrapping for the Kill Bill / Bruce Lee styled generic male character...

The uv for this was a bit hit & miss before.

This week the students get to have a go so I have tidied it up prior to them getting their hands on it.

uv / texturing  work in progress

When it is finished this rig will be available for download for anyone who wants to give it a go, with a choice of textures!

Kill Bill / Bruce Lee inspired costume for the Generic Male animation fundamentals rig.

Got the Generic Male rig finished with Autodesk Maya and HumanIK. The first year animation students have been using it for Animation Principles this semester. Seems to behave itself overall.

Now adding textures.

The first one is a Kill Bill / Bruce Lee inspired costume.

 I included a blood splattered version for a laugh!

Students will get to make this character using Maya after Christmas as part of our Sculpture for Animation module, then rig it as well in HumanIK. 

Looking forward to that, should be a laugh (famous last words if ever I heard them)!

I am planning more textures soon, time permitting.

Big Damn Hands baby!!!

In a moment of madness I dusted down the old Diesel Robots mechanical hands and gave them to the Mark II robot; Massive Holographic hands with Thirty Eight working pistons!!!

I never got them rigged before so it is great to have them done at last.

Big Damn Hands baby!!!

[Yes, I know its ironic that a robot with no actual working joints has half visible magic hands that have tons of working pistons that they do not need (because they are holographic hands).]

But hey, that's just artistic license!!! And it looks great. Mind you, the five 1/2 hour render time for one frame is a bit steep. The laptops fan sounded like it was going to take off. I may have to try our chunky PC's in the green-screen room for this one.

Rigged Pistons galore!

Finished Punch Bag Welder robot

This is the Welder from Punch Bag, nearly finished. The polygons are about done apart from the wires and cables. These will join the various sockets that are already waiting at the joints.

The right arm ends in a welding unit; based upon various real-world robot welders.

This is obviously pre-rigging. The final robot will stand as the rough one did in the previous post.

Refined Maya polygon modelled Robot

Now that I have got the basic shape as I want it I have started to refine the existing geometry and add some detail.

The cables are dummy ones to see how they look.

All of the piston tubes have been improved; a third tube between the other two will allow for great extension and the tubes have had edge loops added so that I could give them ribs and dips.

Lots of the finger and thumb joints have been given raised and sunken areas to make them look like strengthened metal.

The socket in the hip area now has some raised detail.

Once I was satisfied with the shape I aligned the parts for finishing off prior to rigging. I am now attaching the sockets for the cabling that will be created using n-cloth.

I just found this blogg about  John Carpenters 'The Thing'

http://www.outpost31.com/movie/behindscenes.html

Lots of very cool stuff. This is one exert;

 

Palmer Explosion Audio Outtake

The following dialogue is the text from an audio outtake clip recorded by a production sound crew who worked on The Thing.  It is about a minute long and records the comments between Kurt Russell and the effects crew that set up the Palmer-Thing explosion.  It occurs after a particularly large blast goes off (when Mac tosses the TNT at the Palmer-Thing).  It turned out to be much stronger and closer to Kurt and the crew than anyone had anticipated.  If you watch that scene closely, you'll see Kurt almost gets knocked off his feet.  This clip is quite hilarious, but it has a lot of coarse language.  Unfortunately, we cannot post the audio clip on the site due to a strict copyright contract with Universal. 

Here is the text of the audio clip:

[An extremely loud BOOM!]

[The sound of many fire extinguishers and background people screaming and laughing.]

Kurt Russell: "Are you kidding me!?  Are you fucking with me!?  You're kidding me!"

Crewperson: "Are you alright!?"

Kurt: "Holy shit!  Yeah!"

Crewperson: "Are you alright!?"

Kurt: "You fucking asshole!  You gotta be kidding me!" (laughs)

Crewperson #2: "Are you alright!?"

Kurt: "Whoa!" (laughs)

Crewperson #2: "I didn’t expect anything like that!"

Kurt: "Holy fuck!  That shit blew by me sooooo fast man!  Boom!" (laughs)

Crewperson #3: "Holy shit!  A piece landed on my head!"

Crewperson: "Hey!  How was it over there for you?"

Kurt: "Cowafuckingbunga!" (laughs)

Crewperson #3: "Ha Ha!  Did you see that fucking piece burning on my head!?"