Yesterday in class I began by attempting to create a space/planetary scene; however, when I discovered that I could not resize my character, I abandoned the idea because the planets would simply have to be far too large for me to create. I switched to a cityscape idea. I created a rough city from cubes and textures and mapped out a flight sequence with my character through the city. I played with arcs, rotations and camera angles to further simulate the feel of flight.

Once the flight path was completed, I attempted to manipulate the joints of my character to move his arms and legs in flight; however, I discovered that somewhere along the way the joints had irrevocably unbound themselves from the mesh. I successfully rebound the joints to the mesh, but the hypernurbs object became a null object, somewhere along the line, so I couldn't turn off hypernurbs to weight the joints.

Alas, I am stuck at this point.

I finished rendering today, before class. First, I put in an environment, light, and target camera. I had to render twice because I screwed up the render settings the first time around. The render quality wasn't as nice as I had hoped for, but I set the settings to the best quality I could figure to set them to. I'm not sure where I went wrong.

Class today was spent doing the body painting and animating the walk cycle.

Today's class was very productive. I completed the modeling of the head, recreating the cap, and smoothing out all the kinks. Once bound to the body, I put my character in a hyper nurb to see any left over imperfections and deleted excess points that were deforming the mesh.

Then, I rigged the character with the help, once again, of the rigging tutorial. This time I was sure to zero out the joints before binding them, and in turn the weighting process was a lot easier than in my previous assignment.

Next, to body paint!

Last class, I placed my Gilded Sentry into a Symmetry Nurb and realized that I had to make some alterations to his arm and leg and redo the symmetry. Before redoing the symmetry, I created a hand and foot for my character and bound them to the mesh. Finally, I placed it into a Symmetry Nurb and bound the two halves together. Lastly, I began modeling the head. I have not yet finished the head.

Last class I began modeling my Gilded Sentry character using cylinders, the same way I did the Orge. I struggled with aligning the arm to be joined to the arm hole of the torso because I couldn't decide if I wanted to do it in the "t-stance" or not.

Today in class, I finally completed my first walk cycle. I figured out the issue I was having with the joints (with Blyth's help) and corrected the remaining weighting issues. I added a floor, light with shadows, and a target camera to spin around the creature as it walked. Online tutorials we essential to my completion of the walk cycle.

I learned the symmetry tool today. Additionally, I bridged several more planes together with little to no difficulty. Also, I constructed a head for my Orge. I wasn't as successful at creating the head as I had hoped to be. Modeling small features like that is still quite the task for me. I did a quick sketch for my original character that I'm going to work on next class.

I'm still behind on the first walk cycle from our creature project. I'm having a problem getting all the joints to weigh properly to their specific body parts, and in some cases, the joints are still coming out of the mesh. I will need help to rectify this.

Today in class, I finally nailed down my creature design. I've been struggling with creating a figure and idea behind it, but finally got the modeling down. I also watched the skinning and morphing tutorials. I pretty much got the concept of it. This is the second time I've watched a skinning tutorial, so I feel more confident in that aspect than I do with the morphing.

Today in class we watched our relationship exercises. They were all very good. My favorite was the one where the wheel chased the capsule because it was rather humorous. Then we watched 3 tutorials on character modeling from primitives and recreated them in C4D. They were pretty easy to follow once you caught on to the narrator's version of English. I had some problems at first with the matrix extrude function but once I figured it out, the rest was smooth sailing.

Yesterday's class was rather productive. I played around with the morph tag and magnet, and extrude tools. The extrude tool gave me some trouble at first, but I quickly figured things out. After that, I spent the rest of class working on my relationship project. I threw some primitives down first and played around with them to give me some help developing an idea, then drew up a storyboard and began building my animation.

Today in class I was refreshed on how to add textures to objects. I had completely forgotten about the materials menu at the bottom of the screen below the timeline. From there, my animation was pretty much done so I worked with cameras to finalize things before rendering. I tried using a static camera first and moving it along with my animation, but it wasn't very productive. So, I watched the youtube video that was for homework and it got me to use a target camera to follow my object throughout the animation, and it looked pretty decent too. After I finished all that, I just rendered my animation.

In class on Tuesday I completed my first jump animation and began working on my final cylinder animation. Repeating the steps to attach the joints to the cylinder was a bit tricky at first, as I forgot to add polygons to vertical portion of the cylinder to allow it to bend with the joints, so it was all warped. However, Blyth pointed out the problem and I was able to move forward from there with little difficulty. The only other issue that came up was that the cylinder would turn instead of bend the other way during its jumps. I rectified that problem by adjusting the pole and adding additional keyframes between where the cylinder would switch from bending one way to the other to make sure that it would straighten out first before bending the other way. Another minor thing that I had to be aware of and adjust was making sure that the cylinder didn't fall bellow the ground line when it hit the floor between jumps.

So planing out the animation of the cylinder was a bit laborious. Not so much that it was hard work, but planing the movements out on the frame-by-frame sheets seemed like a bit of overkill. At least in these very early stages of planning, using those sheets seemed a bit premature given that one side of a page captures barely a couple seconds of time and we didn't have much to put down on the paper. Using the storyboard sheets seemed to me to be a much more useful planing tool at this point in the process. I think the other sheets would be far more conducive to really nailing down the specifics once everything had been figured out. Maybe that's what I was supposed to do and just didn't follow the order of the process correctly, haha.

Today in class I refreshed my memory of the basic tools used in C4D. The re-learning curve thus far has been relatively simple to get over. I also learned how to utilize the joint tool. I has some difficulty with it on the first run through, but got that hang of it with subsequent tries. Manipulating the joints inside the cylinder was rather easy to do once all the joints were bound. Towards the end of class I began to plan out my cylinder animation for the first assignment.