More Seahorse. ft. Rigging

I rigged the seahorse last night and this morning. Here's the bone chain.

And then here it is with the controllers. It pretty simple. There is a head bob, back and forth movement for each fin, and the tail curls, uncurls and wiggles slightly side to side. The head and fins use expressions to link the joints and controllers. The tail uses set driven keys.

It feels like it went a lot smoother than the fish. Next up is animating.

Uncreative Seahorse Title?

I finished texturing the origami seahorse this morning. I stamped out and repainted parts of the projection that overlapped. (Sorry I was lazy and didn't add lights to this scene, even though I tested it in the set already made.)

The most difficult thing was that  it's sort of impossible to photograph the skinny side of the Seahorse so I had to fake the layered paper look on those sides or skip it. However, because its a such a small thing and I don't feel like it will be very noticeable, I didn't get very detailed about it. These images are much closer than the camera should get.

Next up for the seahorse is rigging.

In other news, I'm compositing some type exesizes together right now. I realized that despite knowing a few ways to make and work with type in Maya, I had yet to render out anything(besides a really dumb action movie joke), So I'll be uploading those and putting them up soon.

In the process I got really distracted about shaders and found a pretty decent way to make a bubble shader. Although I did take another look at the V ray material and got pretty depressed about the price. My brain cannot handle how to make prisms at this time and oh many crazy beautiful things that shader can do.

Anyhow, I've been asked to help out with some 2D animation and rendering which I'll be starting on tonight. So it may be a so long to Maya for the rest of the month as I soak into Photoshop and After Effects, maybe more Illustrator. And I have to be secrety about them. Boo.

Texturing an Origami Seahorse

Still working on the Origami Seahorse. I put in some more information to help the edges and help for better motion for rigging. The tail and the fins of course being the emphasis. The rest of him will be pretty static.

 And then I tried out the texture, projecting it on like the photo to see how it fits and what bits need to be added to the texture to make it better.

 

Here you can see the inside of the fins and the tail definitely need some work, but I think it looks pretty good for a start.

Besides the Seahorse here, I've recently redone the illustration section of my website. 

Also I'm halfway done with the illustrations for La Jolla's Mermaid and I've started some work on a new commission that is set to be shown at a convention next month. I can't show any work now, but the product will be out soon enough, and I can tell you it has to do with animating a comic book. Other than that I've started scripting some things but that is far if never going to see the light of day....  well 30 more pages and I might let someone look at it, but I know effects are my strong suit so I don't know. Hah.

Maybe I'll smack down some Valentine's Day cards, but if not, Happy Valentine's day!

More Seahorse

 Got a little further with my origami seahorse model. Still, super don't have time for it.

The puppet project I was working on is back on track! The client disappeared for a couple months but has now returned. YAY! I expect to be working on it again within the next week.

Fish Awakening

I've continued my work on my origami sealife short.

I've done a very basic rig using a joint chain, some simple expressions, and a few nurb curves to use as controllers.

I made a basic replica of the set used in the footage to scale including the lights.

After animating the fish in the shot I rendered and composted the effect. Here you can see the finished product, the animation, and the original film footage I took.