For no good reason whatsoever, i’m playing with a ramp shader, using textures rather than colour swatches. Theres aload of cool stuff you can do with it - despite it all looking a bit like a crap photoshop plug in.

Slap the shader on a projection node oriented to the camera and flatten it all out! Its as if you pressed a couple of buttons in photoshop rather than took an hour over it in maya! Here it is on a face!

Hi, this is a post about dynamics! I’m gonna try to show how i’m rigging this face up to do some basic boggling using rigid dynamcs, hair dynamics and a motion path or two.

First! Make some simple geometry to use as rigid bodeahs. These’ll represent the collisions at their most basic level. Plopped in the center of the image above, u can see what i’ve used. A hinge joint and aload of springs finsh it off. Far right is a simple dynamic curve setup, two folicles for the eyes and one for the aerial in the bonce. Connecting some locators to the curve with motion paths gives me a hook to parent the bones to. On the far left is the geom those systems drive - just a lo-poly cut down version to test the basic movement!

The idea is the animation will get imported from the base of the neck, and the dynamics will work themselves out, and then get baked out and re-exported onto the rig. I wish I could keep them all in the same file so I could tweak as I go, but i’m too worried about it all blowing up into a massive mess. I’ve got a dynamics blend in the main rig file so I can blend it in and out as much as I want, or re-bake it if I change the anim! WooW! Flexible!

And here it is moving BOING!! Exciting video to follow soon!

I have to post this just so I remember how when I actually do something new. This load of bob was made months ago to test out silly colours, and how its aged! Oh it’s so ill!

woop! po fella! Oviously I had to bung the translucent plastic shader on this thing, chuck a few lights behind his head, and watch Goldfinger while the computer popped this out!

Well! I’ve changed all the blinns into holler - this is mia’s! I’ve gamma corrected all the colour sploges and am getting well better colour straight out the renderer. Metals are more difficult to control, but they’ll be getting the wragglin soon. I deeply regret not posing this model up into a stupid dancey pose or crap sprint, because now i’m doomed to spend today rendering out just that useless trash. Still, I can read a book or brush the pegs while I wait.

Slapping the colours finally back on the rigged model(which has still got a cold). These are just crappy maya blinns right now with some hobo ligthing and pop reflection.  What to do with those crappy arms! Can I be bothered to redo them, or shall I just rip them off so he looks like a giant Chuba Chup?

The bodeah piece or space nappy’s getting done and it’s all smooth nuff in there! I was mucking around rendering him out endlessly while I stared into space eating a coffee, and this had popped out the computer when I’d stopped thinking about how dogs drink.

I lost a couple of hours today making a real dirt quick lo-poly version for animating! So now you can watch him dance around in the viewport at the speed you do the same. The pic above is an all exciting spot the difference! 1 pic has 1 millions of polys, another has about 210,00 and one has 0 polys. Which is which! Tricky problem!

Oh! Look at all the fun around here! Almost got the main bodeah rig going, had a little arm disaster, so they are short here! Hopefully they’ll grow again soon. Some buddies at work have looked over the rig a bit and given it some mighty improvements so its an animators best friend! I want to put up some rig vids, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Look at some circles wrapped around a bodeah! They are for making things move! It all sounds very good but this is rough like a dogs tonuge so now i’ve got to go over each part of the bodeah and make sure it moves nice.