First Test Animation of Thoracosaur Rig - IN STEREO!

First Test Animation of Thoracosaur Rig - IN STEREO! from Evan Boucher on Vimeo.

Alright everybody, I know I've been slacking on documenting my progress up here lately, so to make up for it here's another video for now. It's in stereo for a test for another class, so if you have any anaglyph glasses laying around, grab 'em.

Here's a quick breakdown of progress that will soon be documented (and by soon I mean I will probably force myself tomorrow or the next day to buckle down and bang it out).

1. The full Skeleton is built - complete with appended transverse and spinal processes for the eroded vertebrae

2. The working units of the scans apparently were not set to real world units when exporting from Geomagic, so the scene has been resized appropriately.

3. The base rig was built. The creature is now fully poseable and animateable. There are some important issues to note and discuss about the balance between complete scientific accuracy and useability/practicality of the rig interface.

4. Environmental Work - I've been manually stitching a plethora of images I took in the Estero de Tamarindo in Las Baulas National Park, Guanacaste Costa Rica. The images are of mangroves along the estuary. I took some 20-30 photos and stitched them together in photoshop, creating a panorama to be used as an environmental backdrop for the final Animation.


5. I did an early animation test which is embedded above.

6. Muscle development - I have a full shoulder/upper arm rigged with muscles. It's going much quicker than expected and I'm very excited about it.


Stay Tuned for more details/videos/Rig Breakdowns

-Evan.

Finished Skeletal Model!

Thoracosaurus neocesariensis Skeletal Turntable - WIP from Evan Boucher on Vimeo.

Here is a playblast of the Completed skeletal model of Thoracosaurus neocesariensis (Crocodylia: Gavialidae).

The model is color coded - anything that is green is laser scanned fossil data, and the cream color was all hand modeled or sampled from duplicated scans. The green color for the scans is in honor of the green sand (glauconite) of New Jersey where the fossils came from.

The next step - Muscles! 

Soon I will post more on the successes, failures, and intense headaches of the actual modeling process.