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.

New low poly human model ready for rigging with HumanIK.

This is a simple low-poly Maya model for level 4 Animation students to experiment animating with in September, then model themselves.

Modelling is pretty much done. Time to rig with HumanIK.

Fixed lights and a Vimeo link.

Here's the next render, with fixes;

• The fans that create moving light beams from above and behind have been slowed down considerably to become atmospheric rather that distracting.
• Fans lights are not as bright.
• The three point lighting is all fixed; different levels on the Key and Fill, and more Rim light have pulled the character out of the darkness considerably.

See the Vimeo link below for a good video version...

https://vimeo.com/175533791

Tweeked lights

Some actual animation!!!

Time to put some life into this...thing.

Below is the Mental Ray look; took three hours and made my lap-top do an impression of a George Foreman grill, and that was without knocking the background out of focus. So I did the Mental Ray movie render (only 80 frames of animation) on some of the Uni machines last week.

Mental Ray rendered version.

Below is a render using software. Still looks pretty good, and I can see the animation but it really lacks the beams of light turning in the background.

Software Version

Nothing fancy, just straight ahead animation and I have not played with the curves via the graph editor yet.

Looking at the lighting in the Mental Ray version the beams are more distracting than expected so I am going to slow them down a lot and make them less visible.

More soon, including the guy with the big hands!!

Its Alive!!!

I call him MKII, but he answers to 'Blinky'!

The first movement test of the HumanIK rigged Mark II robot head, with additional facial / head bones.