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EROSHAMBO:
T H E M O U N D
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TECHNICAL
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CHARACTER CREATION |
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Step 1. Concept
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After studying sketches discussions with Frank Garvey, a model is made of the character, taking into account the way the character will need to move and be textured. To the left is a picture of Hiboy, the main character of the animation. He is a bony, cyborg creature who roams around on one large wheel. His large shell-like helmet is fronted by a glass dome, which protects a glass face underneath, which in turn protects a smaller, more fragile face of bone within. Hiboy can coast along fairly smoothly, keeping his balance as he pedals.
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Step 2. Geometry
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All models are created and animated in 3d Studio Max r3. The model of Hiboy has several joints where he can bend and move: his wheel can spin freely, his legs can flex to pedal the wheel, and his head will be able to swivel in three degrees of freedom. The critical issue in creating a model is to allow enough polygons to create the illusion of organic smoothness, without spending too much of the renderer's overall polygon budget. Weighing in at a little over 4000 polygons, Hiboy is a well-balanced model.
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Step 3. Texture
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The 3DS Max renderer can use a variety of texture maps. In order to give Hiboy and the other characters richness and diversity in their textures, diffuse, bump, and specularity maps were applied. Opacity settings were also added to the glass elements. The overall effect gives Hiboy the appearance of being made of bone and rusted metal. All the characters were given textures much lighter than the surrounding environments, in keeping with the style of the original paintings.
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Step 4. Kinematics
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Inverse Kinematics (IK) is a procedure used to keep a character's body from twisting or moving in ways it shouldn't. Using IK, Hiboy's knees can only bend along one axis, similar to a hinge joint. His hip joints are limited in how far akimbo they can go. His ankles are pinned (in Modeling terms, "bound") to the pedals of his wheel. All these settings on the rotational flexibility ensure that Hiboy's legs will always move in a specific and natural fashion.
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Step 5. Path Following
Using the combination of a Spline and a Path Controller, getting Hiboy to move around can be edited with ease. A Path Controller can set Hiboy's position along the spline in terms of a specific percent travelled at any given moment in time. By adjusting these percentile values, Hiboy's speed can be controlled along the spline, including being able to stop and go backwards.
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Step 6. Expressions
An expression controller is attached to Hiboy's wheel, ensuring that the axle will turn the appropriate amount for the distance Hiboy moves per frame. If the wheel does not turn appropriately or believably, a major portion of the realism of the animation will be lost. Since Hiboy's ankles are bound to the wheel, the turning of the wheel makes his legs pump up and down, completing the illusion. By setting up this script and the IK, Hiboy's controls have been greatly simplified... the animator now just has to lay out a spline and a path controller to finish the animation.
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CHARACTER ANIMATION |
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Capsule/Bone System
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Characters who are less jointed and more fleshy (such as the one-legged man to the left) are given a flexible structure through a capsule-bone system, where a bone skeleton is laid over the object, and each bone is given a set of vertices to control. The vertices are selected through a capsule system, as each vertex is "weighted" to one or more bones. A vertex shown in red belongs entirely to a single bone, and as the color goes from orange to blue, the vertex is increasingly weighted and shared to other bones as well.
In the sample to the left, the thigh bone controls all the knee vertices absolutely, but can only moderately stretch the vertices at the hip. This effect gives the motion of the model a more fleshly appearance, as it avoids appearing like a jointed automaton.
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Flexible Animation
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Because of the bone system and the addition of an inverse kinematics give the character a full range of flexibility. By manipulating the end effectors of the model (the blue markers at the end of each limb), the character can move and react in a realistic and reflexive manner.
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PROCESS INDEX |
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