Mouse in Action!

Now, it's done! Like I was having a baby. It took a long time for me to create this mouse character. Because there was lots of things I wanted to try, learn and test... and forget too heh heh. :) Also, I've tried to create a flexible bone system to stretch limbs of the character. There is lots of bones. Ears of the mouse is controlled by 3 bones. Also nose is controlled by 3 bones to apply a subtle draging motion to the nose. Arms, legs, spine, and neck are stretchable. It was all done pretty well. And for the material, I'm using Mental Ray with SSS Fast Skin Shader. You can see nice Surface-Scattering effect at fingers, ears, and tail. It makes rendering time a bit long but looks just the way I like. ;)

Skining a Mouse

Well... I think I'm done with rigging... eventually. :) Now I'm proceeding through the least fun thing to work, skining. I spotted a problem with deformation at knuckle area of the fingers. I pull back pivots of the fingers a little bit to fix it, and luckly it didn't caused and weird twisting crazy bones or something like that. :) Anyway. Stay tuned for a few more test animations in a week.

Facial Rig in Action!

I've procrastinated enough. It's time to show something. Put the polygons on the table, you know what I mean... ;) After some organizing files&folders, (thanks god that that I didn't delete anything) I did a few texturing tweak for the Sub-Surface-Scattering material. I painted a new texture in Photoshop. Now it seems better. By the way, I give up making whiskers because there is a tiny problem. Sticking whiskers on the nose of the character is easy, but making them follow the surface while morphing is only possible with attachment constraints. Not that it's difficult or confusing, it's just slowing down the rig significantly and It doesn't seem very important detail for me. Got the idea in the last minute anyway. Better let go of it.

Now, you may watch the first mouse character Binky's facial rig video by clicking right image. (you'll need Techsmith codec) I've created 12 facial shapes. (actually 21 with progressive targets) Then, I've made those fancy control shapes over the head bone. After that, I used the Reaction Manager to setup these custom shapes to drive Morph Targets. It's really a happy event for me that I finally got a reason to use Reaction Manager, and it works pretty good too. :D

Now, it's all ready right? Or... should I try some cloth simulations? Oh, back to the procrastination. :P