Vince Progress

These past few days I've been working on getting Vince ready to animate. With only a few more adjustments left around the head and chest area he should be up and running within a day or two.

Rigging this time around has been more or less a painless affair but anyone that knows me well enough will tell you that I actually don't like rigging very much. Actually I kind of hate it altogether. Other than the satisfaction of building, rigging, and animating a character from start to finish I'd prefer there be an automated way for us animators.

Because rigging a character is a troubleshooting process, just when you think the rig is behaving properly, you move an arm and realize suddenly your character has bat wings. It's annoying yes but I'd be lying if I said it didn't provide some hilarious results at times.

Below I've posted a few images of the Vince and what he's looked like through out this entire process. I've always like to look behind the scenes of a project so I figure someone else might like it to.

Ambient Occlusion render. "Baking" an ambient occlusion map will add extra depth and dimension to a character. You'l notice that there isn't very much color yet the character is still readable. An occlusion layer overlaid on top of textures and normal maps often time will result in a nicer looking model.

This is the first texture pass for the shirt and pants. At this point normal maps have been attached and you can see it adds nice folds in his shirt and pants without adding extra geometry to the model.

This is a shot of Vince, with rough pass at textures and added normal and occlusion maps. I'm sure its obvious it doesn't look that great. The normals look too "hot" and artifact because no proper lights have been added to the scene.

At this point Vince has been properly textured and all the maps have been hooked up to a rim shader. Overall it has nicer quality but you can see that the normals (clothing folds) aren't really showing up too well. On top of this, the rim shader isn't working properly and there is no enough lighting contrast.

Light test number 2. Immediately its noticeable that the rim shader is now working properly. You get a nice bit of light on the edges of the character and creates a nicer silhouette, but again no normals, no clothing folds, and the model is still looking a little flat.

By this point I've lit Vince in numerous ways and finally decided to use a method to fake Global Illumination. Although its results in a darker render, with odd shadows its heading in the right direction and all maps are working as they should.

Finally! After fiddling around with some parameters I managed to render the image you see above. The render to the left was still a little dark so after some contrast and color correction I achieved the render you see on the right.

Rigging Problems! I hate fixing this stuff. The shoulder joint is influencing areas below the armpit. As a result when you lift the arm, everything else follows. Also his teeth, tongue and eyes don't seem to be sitting properly inside the head.
More rig problems! Broken teeth, jaw, eyelids, and too many other problems to list.

Rig updates to follow in the next few days.