Ned Bunsem Rigging, Handles and Weight Painting

The reason i listed rigging and animating as one of my deliverable is solely down to my previous animations which wasn't my best and i felt that having the awareness of the animating process would help in a CV and to reestablish my skills at animating. The thought process of rigging became much clearer to me and i noticed and understood why i had to do certain things which would affect a later piece of movement. So i began the rigging process by adding a skeleton and joints to particular areas of movements such as elbows, hips, neck and so on but then once that had been done i had to create the method of movements so adding controls to those specific joint movements.

Once that was in place i had to bind the skeleton to the model and then i had started to restrict particular movements such as the elbow moving in directions it shouldn't but also adding new forms of movements through IK handles to allow a more precise range of movement for something such as a heel movement. This process is daunting in trying to get the right angles and forms of movements before locking in the range of movements of the character but i was able to understand the thought process behind the locking of controls and in my previous character model i worked at a much tighter and free modelled character to which his feet weren't flat and that is where i realised why i needed to keep the feet flat to the floor and is something i noticed in the controls process as it made the workflow much smoother and relaxing.

 

Once the handles and controls were set i of course tried the controls out to see their movements and found anomalies in the characters movements from stretched legs to expanded arms and this at which point weight painting comes into affect. I had to do alot of weight painting and moving the character into various positions and as you can see in the image i had limited the amount of edge loops in certain areas which really did come in effect once the leg started to be positioned but weight painting had allowed me to smooth out the leg without adding edge loops. In the end the positions i place the character in weren't as streatched as before but looked much more fluid and is now ready to be used for animating.

Adding Backgrounds to the Levels

After completing the concept art designs for the game levels i knew that they were missing the background image and that had been because i wanted to produce that separate and save time as this background image would be used within the scene of the game level. So i started to develop a basic layout of the games background and because i didn't want to take the attention away from the viewer of the actual game level i didn't go into detail. The design of the background was all down to just creating that ice covered fridge interior where the fridge has been freezing and producing ice because Ned Bunsem had lowered the temperature to keep the food landmarks intact and also within the icy fridge interior you would see bits of food and also because this is an image for the back of the level an area which wouldn't fully be seen i was able to save much more time in re-using the image and just adding new pieces of food or changing bits around to create a difference between the images. Below are the backgrounds on the left and their use in the scene of the level on the right and i feel it goes well with the level layout not really taking away from the level but also adding an interest as it captures some attention.

Level Concept Art - America

After the two methods of producing the concept art with the Canada and Mexico levels i decided to reuse the method from the Mexico level and started to block out basic colours of the level after splitting the level into thress sections because the design was much larger than previous level designs. Once again the Mexico method served its purpose and was able to allow me to produce the concept of America to where i hadn't lingered on the same area for hours on end but rather worked my way through the level design and able to show visually of what the level will look like, at the end i am happy with the final piece once i had joined up the individual areas of the level but i always feel like it's not good enough but also realised that if i try to take this further it would look much different from the previous concept art pieces and i would have also spent too much time on this piece, however at the end both myself and Tom were happy with the layout of the level and didn't require any additional work and that i should move on to the next objective.

Level Concept Art - Mexico

After realising how much time i had spent on the Canada level i went the other route in the concept art process of the Mexico level, rather than do the outline i would basicaly block the colour of the level and then work from there and now looking at the images i think this should have been the process from the start as it had been quick and at the end suits the level design from the simplicity of it's design as you can look at the Canada level which didn't really look as clean and finished as the Mexican level. Once again i had broken the entire level into two sections and worked from there by colour blocking the entire level and then worked on by adding sauces and just having the level look much like a platform level where you can look at the concept art and see the start to the end and how you would work your way through the level. At the end i feel that this process really stuck with me and will be taken into the concept art of the America level because looking at the end result i had gotten the end product right and in a quick process and yes, there is much more that i coud improve on but this wasn't something i had thought about when listing that i would do multiple briefs.

Level Concept Art - Canada

The process of the level design had began with myself and Tom breaking down the levels into countries and types of dishes to that country to which Tom was given the role of the level designer and anything to do with the level. Creating the concept art had been pretty much similar to how we approached the work in our other project where Tom would set out the level design and i would use that as a template to do a piece of concept art and that method carried over to our own project. As you can see from the first image Tom had sketched out the level design into seven pieces to which i had pieced together then realised that breaking the Canadian level into two section would be much easier and quicker to work with then constantly zooming into work on a specific area. So after going round Tom's sketched version of the level and making a much clearer outline i was ready to start adding the colour and because we chose to have Canada as a dessert dish and as shown in Tom's designs i used a pallette of brown, with mixtures of contrasts of the colour to represent chocolate as chocolate is constantly used within desserts. I also added various colours to objects within the level such as butterscotch fingers, strawberries, pancakes and more but once i had done as much i had done within the time the time that i had i had uploaded the unfinished pieces of work to myself and Tom's Facebook page and Tom had told me that the use of brown through various contrasts doesn't help as it flows into one big piece of food rather than individual pieces of food, so when i have the time to return back to the images i will change the level to allow certain areas to stand out and not blend into one.

Now, i had gone back to the Canada level and had redone areas of the level to make sure that it doesn't go into one big pieces of food, this was done through the change of the ice cream and bringing colours of raspberry and mint along with finishing the other colours of the marshmallows which add differences within the concepts. At this point i realised that i had spent too much time trying to get this perfectly right and felt that i should hurry things up and just place both half's together and see the overview of the whole level and i was quite satisfied with the result although i did realise that i could have done certain areas much better the fact that i had stopped when i did made me realise that i would have spent way too much on something which shows what was intended and did not need any more polishing because there is more work that follows which needs attention rather than this one piece of concept taking up my time.

Ned Bunsem Textured

Here is the complete and textured model of Ned Bunsem and as you can see from the video above there had been areas of which needed individual focus when it had come to texturing such as the N symbol on Ned sweater and the freckles on his cheek. But generally the visual representation of the character Ned Bunsem uses the various colours quite well on the model as each colour is important to the area that it covers and is in a colour tone will not be used in the level texture allowing the character to flow through the level without a clash of colours. Also the use of simple block colours is favourable to the model as additional detail could be streatched when animating the character but where the character is at and the texture myself and Tom are happy with the current stage and feel that haaving the character simple is better than having details which would hardly be noticed in gameplay, so we are looking at keeping the colour pallette of our game to a minimum.

Ned Bunsem UV Mapping

The next process which was needed was the process of UV mapping the Ned Bunsem model which is a difficult process in which i had to maintain the areas of the model in the UV map to allow myself to know what areas i am working with and as you can see i did break the areas such as arm, leg, hands and so on to allow myself to focus on certain areas. The fact that the areas had been broken into separate pieces and done through only have of the model is because i realised that the model would be symmetrical would not need additional UV maps so i could focus on one half but when it had come to adding individual bits of details i would do so by taking the faces of that explicit area and UV mapping it to be textured separately. The reason why the route of taking away individual faces didn't matter was due to the model consisting of block colours which is why the high level UV mapping was not needed, for example taking the face and having it UV mapped separately, where as Neds face is primarily made up of his glasses and his smile and right now i am at the stage of texturing Ned with block colours as areas of detail, the reason for this is because the size of the character is not at scale of which high levels of detail will be noticeable.