Lure - Rigging and animation

When I started working on the animations for the lure I had a very basic idea of rigging and that it involved creating bones for the model, attaching them to the model somehoqw and weighting them correctly to control the deformations of the mesh. I didn't really know to do any of this so I splashed out on a copy of Digital Tutors Rigging in Max which gave a complete overview of the process.

After playing around with creating my own skeleton for a while I did a little research into CAT Motion which my tutor Mark had mentioned. CAT Motion used to be a plugin for 3DS max but in the 2011 version was integrated into the full package. After messing around creating human shaped Cat Parents. I came a cross a short series of videos on youtube which run through creating walk cycles to be used in UDK.

This set of videos was extremely useful for what I need to do, it was only in the last video that it became tailored to UDK so I was able to use it for what I need for unity. I created the same base human Cat Parent that he describes in the video and spent a good few while laying it out before spending at least and hour editing the envelopes in the skin modifier, pretty much following the tutorial word for word at this point. I then wanted to create my first walk cycle, this would be so that the Lure could walk through the environment ahead of the player. I carried on with the YouTube tutorial and referred to this exact episode:

I combined a couple of the motion editor preset's to get quite a slow calm walk and ended up just tinkering with the independent variables for each section of the CAT parent. I specifically turned down a lot of the roll on the shoulders and hips as this point the walk looked quite feminine. I also changed the jumper and trousers for the lure as the geometry wasn't perfect for animation. I moved the sculpts around a bit adjusting the joints and shoulders before re-topologising and re-baking the normals. This time the meshes worked a little better for animation and I was left with this:

Lost - Illuminance

On of the things I played around with a lot recently was the face on the reverse of the skull which would face forward on the lost. Initially I experimented with adding different faces made out of cracks to the bump on the skull. An idea came up to have the face glow as if light was shining through the cracks. I did a bit of research and found out about illuminance maps which will emit light from wherever there is colour on the map. Here is the result I got with the added map.

The great thing about this effect is that the face will shine even when there is no light shined on the object, so the object could sit completely in the dark and the face would be visible. After I made this map I added illuminance to the eyes of the Lure as well.

Lost - Texturing Human skin

I tried a bunch of different ways to texture the skin for the Lost. The first was using cropped pictures of elephant skin to get a heavily wrinkled grey texture which I thought would look quite appropriate for the neglected look of the character, I took that texture and adjusted it in photoshop blending in some more natural skin tones to give it a bit more realism. After a while I started again since the wrinkles just didn't look right no matter how I edited them. This time around I added a porous texture to the bump similarly to what I did with the skull except a lot more subtle before playing with different images of skin to get this final texture:

You can also see that I stencilled a swirling soot like texture on the hands and feet to give the impression that he has been around fire.