Modeling & Animation::
Modeling::
The easiest way to model this puppy is to create him out of polygons. This allows very easy and quick modeling, and the inacuracies accompanied by polygons, ie sharp edges, flat shading etc.., lend themselves well to some of the techniques used later on.
The puppy started life as a cube, which was then sub-divided and split to create the main shape. The body, legs and neck were roughly extruded out, and then half of the body deleted. This is so that only half of the body needs to be modeled, then mirrored.
The modeling pipeline is to model in low-poly count, then use the smooth tool to create a high poly version.
The smooth tool takes the low-poly mesh and uses a spline routine to smooth off the corners. Although this leads to smooth objects, then intricacies and details of the low-poly version are lost in the process. One way to constantly check what the smooth version will look like is to model the low-poly mesh while viewing the high poly mesh in realtime. A way to do this is to model the low mesh, duplicate it then smooth the duplicate. Then procedurally link the World Mesh node of the low-poly version to the Mesh In of the high poly version. This allows the manipulation of the low-poly mesh whilst continuously updating the smooth version. A very useful trick.
A lot of sculpting is then required to get decent results.
Once the body modeling is complete, the head and facial features must be done. The head should start as a sphere, and roughly modeled into shape, pulling the nose out, creating cheek bones, eye cavities and ears. The same low/high poly trick should be used again, for ease of modeling.
With the complete puppy now in low and high poly version still procedurally linked, skinning takes place. Smooth skinning is the best skinning method for this model, as a quadraped would be extremely difficult to Rigid Bind, mostly due to the scretch and give around the shoulders of the animal. The easiest way to skin the dog is to bind the skeleton to the low poly mesh, and have the high poly version just update behind the scenes. This makes painting skin weights onto the dog very easy due to the simple nature of the mesh.
After the skining has taken place, IK handles were added to the legs of the dog, and an IK Spline added to the spine. The resulting curve CVs were clustered and parented to locators to allow easy access to those controls.
Animation::
With the puppy skinned and the skeleton set-up correctly, animation becomes easy to produce. Using a dog's run/walk/trot cycle for reference, the next thing to do is take into account the things learnt from looking at Mulan. The extreme motion, stupid poses and overall feeling of clumsiness, playfulness and the like. The animation must bring this accross to the audience.
Innovations Project:: Daniel Canfora MMI
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