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.