Skinning Phase I

I was forced to take a week off on production due to the DIGM labs being closed for updates and maintenance... but now I'm back, well rested, and in full force. I did all of the first pass weight painting on the skin of the Thoracosaurus. If I wasn't using a muscle system, this would be the point where I would start animating...however, I need to still paint all the muscle weights now, so that the skin connects to the muscles and deforms properly. I already set up a control that affects the jiggle attributes of all the muscles. I can control the stiffness of different parts of the body now, through a simple control setup, which can be adjusted and animated on a shot per shot basis.

Anyway, at least I can pose him now!

ZBrush Maps into Maya....Check

...also misc other texturing done

Skin Painting

I finished up the painting of the skin in Pixologic's ZBrush. It saved me a lot of time of guessing and checking UV coordinates in Photoshop...and the time was better spent making things look better opposed to simply lining things up. I looked at a lot of Gharial photographic reference to try to get the texture down. I was also able to use the same alphas I used when sculpting the displacement detail as brushes for painting. I really enjoyed taking the time to grunge things up, and make the guy look worn. I even went as far as adding dirt and mud on his legs and belly; stuff he probably would have picked up when transitioning from land to sea.

ZBrush 3.5R3 has a much more streamlined pipeline than the last time I used ZBrush (which I think was version 2 over a year ago). I was able to export displacement and normal maps, as well as color texture maps, and bake out a cavity map to multiply on the diffuse image, all with very little effort. I'm still working on baking in the Ambient Occlusion to the texture. I still need to paint a texture for the eye, which I'm looking forward to. (Images are directly out of ZBrush.Click on Images for Full Detail).

Sculpting Work

Here are my digital sculpts (Click the images for high-res view). I put a lot more detail into the skin through ZBrush, after Autodesk Mudbox was giving me a lot of trouble with memory handling. Constant crashes and clunky pipelines drove me to ZBrush which has been much more stable. All of the scale detail is from black and white "alphas" sampled from actual crocodylian images. The tail and underbelly came from an alligator, and the sides, neck and arms came from gharial texture reference. It could be a bit cleaner but ZBrush is giving me a problem with subdividing one more level. It should be enough detail for now, but I'm looking for methods to get that final subdivision level that would make it all around polished. I might be able to achieve it through adjustments to the exported displacement map in Photoshop. Anyway, next is painting the skin and attaching the skin to the muscles (which seems to be relatively straight forward from the tests I did). I got approval on my muscles from Dr. Dodson, other than a few minor tweaks in positioning that I have to do. Mostly the back muscles didn't go quite high enough, so I will adjust that. Hopefully I will be getting some more motion tests out this weekend or early next week if all goes to plan! Very Exciting!



On another note, check out the recent article in the Drexel Triangle that talks about the Drexel Paleo program, as well as mentions a bit about my project, here.

LOTS of Progress!!!

Sorry for the severe lack of updating on all of this...in the meantime, here are a bunch of images to show you where I'm currently at. I started and finished the muscle system...pending approval from the committee, and I just finished the base mesh. That is the mesh below does not have any textures, shaders, or sculpted displacement (scales, fine skin texture etc) just yet. That's the project for the weekend. Hopefully sometime too I'll get around to posting a video of the dynamic squashing and stretching of the muscles in action. Very Exciting...anyway. I'll probably post my UV pelt this weekend....they always make interesting images in and of themselves...

As always, be sure to click the images for the full resolution versions:

Above, you can see the muscles (red) laid over the fossil (blue) and appended bone (green).

Above: Details of the edge flow for the Thoracosaurus model.

Now it's on to combining the skin to the skeleton/muscle....wish me luck!

-Evan B.

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.