Captains log - Week 14

       Honestly, not much exciting happened this week. I basically made the final changes to my character clip. None of which are very significant. I think the only things I fixed or changed was the way in which the biped falls through the air, and the way he lands in the water. But they're very minor changes. The production of my character clip is 100% done, but it just needs to be rendered.

       The other things that I worked on this week was Mr. Smiths factory arm. I didn't work on it too much though because I was more focused on fixing my character clip, but this is what I got done.

It's not much, but it's something. Anyways, it was a pretty straightforward week.

                       This has been a PSA,
                                                         Captain out

Captains log - Week 13

       This week has been a pretty big week for my character video. I have gotten a whole lot farther this week than I was last week.

       One of the most noticeable things I did this week was that I placed a green-screen behind my helicopter. The purpose of this is so that I can easily create the image of a moving sky behind the helicopter using adobe premier. I still have to light up the screen a little better, but it's going pretty smoothly thus far.

The only problems I need to fix with the green screen are light up the corner so that there is no black shading, and reduce the shinyness of my helicopter so the you cannot see the green reflecting off of it.

       The next thing I did to my scene was I finally got the door placement 100% correct, and I got my biped/character to jump out of the helicopter. My overall goal with this project is to have my character jump out of the helicopter, and land in a large pool of water. So far I have all of that animated, but all I have to do is add some water at the bottom of my scene, which won't be too difficult.

 

The animation isn't as smooth as I would like it to be, but it is definitely presentable, and the best I can really do. I've been struggling with the animation of this guy, so I am really happy with the results. I should have this scene totally rendered out by monday.

                   This has been a PSA,
                                                         Captain out

 

Captains log - Week 12

       This week I worked a lot more on my helicopter, and a little bit more on my character. The main thing I did this week was that I finally was able to cut out a nice looking door for the side of my helicopter and get it to open.

This was honestly a very difficult task because I was having a lot of trouble figuring out a way to cut a hole in the side of my helicopter, and then making a shape that fits over that hole perfectly and works as a door. I was able to accomplish this by making a copy of the body of my helicopter, and deleting the outer poly's, forming a square, and then deleting the inverse poly's on the original copy.

The other thing I accomplished this week was placing my character inside of my helicopter. All I had to do was scale my copter to the correct size, and insert my character into the scene. And it works nicely because you can see my character through the windows of the helicopter.

Overall, I think this works very nicely, and I am happy with the results. I also worked on the inner part of the Helicopter, by making walls to form the inner area, and adding a floor for my character to stand on. It didn't take me very long, but it looks quite nice.This is what the inside of the helicopter looks like.

Anyways, that's pretty much all I did this week.
  
                                          This has been a PSA,
                                                                             Captain out

Captains log - Week 11

       Week 11 has been quite an interesting week. Throughout the duration of the week, we mainly focused on creating and modeling a character or figure by rigging a mesh outline of a character to a biped. The creation of the mesh skin itself was not a difficult task, and neither was adjusting the biped to fit inside of the mesh. The issues lied within the rigging of the mesh to the biped. Whenever I would try to move a body part, some of the mesh from a different limb or part of the body would move with it. And when I tried to adjust it, not all of the limb or body part would move with rest of it.

Here is a clear example of my failure at the rigging process:

       Another thing I focused on this week was finishing up and fixing my helicopter. My final plan for this project is to have my biped/character jump out of the helicopter while it is in flight and land in water. The only difficulty with this project is that I seem to be having trouble animating a door for my helicopter. I have created the windows on the sides, and finished almost everything else, but creating sliding doors for it seems to be quite the difficult task

The other thing that I'm having some trouble with is animating the window for the cockpit to its final shape. I've been able to modify it to something that looks better than what it originally looked like, but it still needs a lot of work. I suppose I am slowly making progress with that part of the project.

Here is what the codified cockpit currently looks like:

 
It still needs a lot of work, but it's slowly getting better and better each day.

                                     This has been a PSA,
                                                                             Captain out