Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll first be speaking about how I went about finding and downloading the character rig I chose to use for my animation. Secondly, I’ll be showing you how I textured my character rig, highlighting the small problems I faced during the process. Thirdly, I’ll be talking to you about the walk cycle animation I created this week, alongside the playblasts I rendered out, displaying the final look. Lastly, I’ll be listing the personal objectives that I’ve set for myself to complete by the end of next week.
This Week’s Task:
I began this week off by getting my character rig sorted out. I chose to use a downloadable character rig, rather than creating one from scratch, because I’m not yet experienced enough to create an aesthetically appealing character rig within the time I have left to complete this animation. Furthermore, as mentioned in my previous blog post, I want to invest as much time as possible on the animation aspect. Firstly, I browsed through Youtube videos suggesting the best websites to download character rigs from.
Downloading Character Rig:
Throughout all of the websites I explored, Animation Buffet seemed to catch my eye the most as it consisted of a variety of character rigs to choose from. I decided to choose the character rig “Sam” as i needed a standard human male for my story.
To help me understand how this character rig works, I was provided with a video, showing all the features the rig includes, which will be useful to refer back to once i start animating.
To further ensure that this rig would be ideal for me, I watched another review video on the character rig, seeing what other people’s opinions were on it. From watching both reviews, I got the idea that the rig itself wasn’t too complicated to use, which is great for me as I’m still fairly new to character animation.
Fortunately for me, I was able to download the Same character rig for UAL’s 3D asset library folder, meaning I would have access to it free of charge.
Once I had downloaded the character rig, I was ready to import it into my scene. The first thing I did was re-adjust the size of the character so that it aligned with the Backroom environment. I decreased the X, Y & Z Scale from 1 to 0.4.
Importing & Re-adjusting Character Rig:
Now that the sizing was all sorted, I wanted to clean up the character rig’s geometry so that I knew where everything was and labeled as. Furthermore, I also deleted the pre-existing textures and applied my own as all AI Standard Surface materials. This meant I was aware of how many materials I had and what they were named.
Texturing Character Rig:
After cleaning up my character rig’s geometry, I was ready to begin texturing my character model. I began by exporting and importing my character’s body components from Maya into Substance Painter.
For the first time ever, I chose to experiment with the skin materials provided by Substance Painter. I wanted little detail on my character’s skin because I didn’t want him to appear too cartoony, and wanted a tad of realism implemented.
Once I was done experimenting with the skins’ smart materials, I exported the texture I had and applied them to my character’s model in Maya. However, as I applied it, I realised there were some bits off with the texture. I wasn’t sure where this problem stemmed from at first, but then I had assumptions that it may have been concerning the object’s UV.
To work my way around this problem, I went into the UV editor to see what I could do to fix it. At first, I saw my UV shells were laid out correctly, meaning there could be a problem with the actual textures themself. So I selected the UV shells and reduced their size and re-positioned them so that the fingers were no longer at the bottom of the UV anymore.
Reducing the size and re-positioning the UV shells seem to of done the trick. With that said, I realised that little details within the skin were now more visible due to me reducing the size of the UV shell. However, this wasn’t a problem for me at all.
I repeated this method for the other body parts of my character model until I was completely satisfied with how my character object looked.
The next step for me was to texture the character’s clothes, consisting of only a T-shirt and pants. Therefore I selected both the T-shirt and pants and exported them out as an FBX file, and imported them into Substance Painter.
After baking my materials, I browsed through the fabric’s smart materials until I saw one that would be an ideal look for my character, and then applied it to my T-shirt. Next, I browsed for a denim smart material and applied it to my pants.
There were a few little details within the smart materials that I wasn’t too keen on. However, I was able to resolve this by going into the smart materials and hiding those specific bits of details. For instance, I hid the white pattern that was printed on the denim jeans.
Once I was satisfied with how my T-shirt and pants textures looked, I exported them our and applied them to my character’s T-shirt and pants object.
The last thing for me to export and import into Substance Painter was my character’s hair. Again, I wanted to include small detail in the hair so the character didn’t appear too cartoony.
After importing my object, i looked for an hair smart material and applied it to my hair material.
The only tweak I wanted to make was the colour of the hair. I was able to do this within the smart material’s controls.
Once I was satisfied with the appearance of my hair texture, I exported them out and applied them to my character’s hair object in Maya. I also applied the same hair material to my character’s eyebrows because a person’s hair and eyebrows share the same colour.
The next thing I chose to texture was my character rig’s eyes. The eyes were divided up into three separate parts, meaning there needed to be 3 different materials. These parts included the Eyeball, Iris, and Pupil.
I found an image online of a realistic-looking eyeball that I could use as the base colour of my objects.
I applied the image of the eye to my Pupil object, followed by the Eyeball object.
As I applied it to the Eyeball object, I realised that the pupil of the eye image appeared to be too large. In an attempt to fix this, I began by going into the UV Editor to see what I could do.
As you can see in the two screenshots below, you can see that I sclaed the UV shell up and re-positioned many of the edges to achieve the look I wanted. I moved the edges within the pupil area outwards to reduce the size of the pupil. As well as this, I moved many of the edges outside the pupil area inwards, so that the white bits of the eyeball would display more, rather than the red bits.
When I was done adjusting the UV Shell, I believed the pupil was still a tad too big for my liking. From here, I chose to take a look at the Eye’s controls to see if there was anything that may have been of use.
Fortunately for me, I found controls that enable me to increase and decrease the size of the iris and pupil. I played around with the numbers until i achieved the look i wanted.
The last thing I had to do was to texture the remaining character’s geometry, all of which I gave them basic standard colours.
Walk Cycle Animation:
The next task on my list was to animate the walk cycle for my character rig. To help me do so, I looked through Youtube tutorial videos, guiding me through the easiest methods.
I began by exporting my textured character rig out from my Backroom environment and importing it into a brand-new scene. I wanted to create a scene dedicated to the walk cycle strictly, so I could just import this animation into my backroom environment for the scenes that require my character to walk. This would save me from re-animating the walk cycle over and over again.
I followed every step that was shown throughout the Youtube videos and was able to produce a smooth walk cycle. During this process, i spent a period of time within the Animation Graph Editor to smooth keyframes out. As well as this, to convert the animation into a cycle, i clicked on:
Curves > Pre Infinity > Cycle
Curves > Post Infinity > Cycle
This ensured that my walk cycle animation would continously repeat.
To get a more accurate look at how my walk cycle appeared, I rendered out a few playblasts, showing the walk cycle from various angles.
Overall I’m more than satisfied with how my walk cycle animation came out; however, I’ll be required to tweak this animation in the future for a few scenes as I need the walk to align with the character’s emotions.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Camera Set-up.
- Animate Scene 1.