quick post _ progress

quick render showing the texture on the back wall and the new
lighting rig.

trouble with texturing

I'm experiencing a problem right now with the texturing of this battery character. It seems that the textures on the side of the shape get a disproportionately large degree of shadow, as shown in the examples below. The first example is a render region, the second is a screen shot, of the same object. The texture doesn't show up in the render region.
After some exploration I discovered that the issue might have something to do with implicit/explicit texturing.



*fixed the problem with some learning about basic lighting, see more recent posts.

Long shot rough

ZAPOPATHIC: Breathing and Concentrating

• too dark
• not sure of the affect it has
• missing light bulb
• may add crowd
• may add additional lights
• velvet pillow needs work
  

+ textured, label
+ good atmosphere

LS rough from Arthur Dent on Vimeo.





*working on the light bulb, have to add another PASS, a BEAUTY PASS so that I can see whats going on, currently I have a DIFFUSE PASS so that I can render Ambient Occlusion and Composite the DIFFUSE, AMBIENT, & HIGHLIGHT PASSES together.

this is a bit thrown together from a post I saw on XSIbase, the gist of which (from what I gather)
is that you Composite a color PASS with an ambient occlusion PASS. I also determined, I'm not sure how, that there should be a SPECULAR PASS. I looked around in the preset PASS list and found that there was a HIGHLIGHT PASS, so I used that. These PASSES are set up using OVERRIDES to add or subtract (I think) material parameters. So in the case of the HIGHLIGHT PASS, the Diffuse and Ambient parameters of the materials are Muted.

*The lightbulb has issues in and of itself... the spiral shape doesn't lend itself to easy manipulation other than with PROPORTIONAL MODELING.

*some of the questions I am asking myself right now are, should I make a new BEAUTY PASS, so that I can get all of the illumination that I need? What should I do about the lightbulb socket? It doesn't look good right now.

*have to work on the velvet pillow

Walk!

Zapopathic:


Walk! from Arthur Dent on Vimeo.
finally making some progess

Working on the walk cycle ( comments on Vimeo); there are a number of things that I did with this that are probably a waste of time although I guess I'm learning,

• constrain the effector on the arm chain to a curve

I could have accomplished this just by normal animation, although

its very easy to cycle, and it mightlook better.

makes a bit of a mess in the scene

• duplicate in symmetry the setup from the left side

This is just a pointless waste of features in this case.. in my opinion/ quick though

• used a curve to generate the bone structure for the arm

This is also a waste of good features, although again it seems to work well

One thing that I found is that the constrain feature gets you into
trouble when trying to pose the skeleton with multiple
bones

• rotated the upper body to accentuate the arm movement +

• enveloped the "sleeves"/boot to the bone

this might have been accomplished better and I'm not sure how, maybe if I constrained the cluster "boot" to the root null

there are some problems with this envelope when it is tested under X-treme conditions: for instance the arm itself buckles with 40 degree bending, maybe I could use a bend modifier, don't know, have had difficulty with the bend modifier before

walk1 from Arthur Dent on Vimeo.

ant body

Working on the body for the ant character, has a really modern/new looking sleek style. Not just an ant anymore.

here are some assorted pictures,

...reminds me of the Dark Knight.