For The Reptile Enthusiasts

[cl1ff]

I don't know that I have ever had a work that I considered "finished," so I guess I had better just post in this forum.

I have been revisiting this tegu lizard object that I modelled some time back to get a little more practical experience with UV mapping. Here are a couple of different poses and lighting situations. If you want to see the Divx avi of its walk cycle, you can see it at the following link for the price of 1.3megs of download. http://www.magic-media.com/images/Walk5.avi

Without radiosity...
http://www.magic-media.com/images/TeguOblNoRad.jpg


With...

http://www.magic-media.com/images/TeguWalkTxt2.jpg


And an obligatory top view...

http://www.magic-media.com/images/TeguTopRad.jpg


I used planar UV mapping on half of the object and then mirrored. There are separate UV maps for the head, body, front legs, and back legs. There is a slight texturing seam between the head and body and along the sides of the legs. Oh well, live and learn.

I say Good Day!

[cathuria]

Well, except for the texture glitches you mentioned, I think he (she?) is an excellent little critter.
Or big critter... if you give him an appropriately scaled city to stomp...:)

[mjroddy]

Ok. Here's a INCREDIBLY minor thing - compared to your awesome job - In the animation, I noticed that his feet flatten out before they connect with the ground. Those critters usually let their little toes connect and then the feet will flatten down. And vise-verse. As they lift, the toes lag behind a bit (My bro used to have a similar beast).
If the reptile wasn't so close to great, I wouldn't even have caught these very minor thoughts (my brain is filled with minor thoughts).

[blinblue]

Well, the only thing I can think to change is the front toes, they seem to be a little to straight. Maybe add a little angle difference between the toes on either side of the reptile. Just a little thought to make it looks less CG

[Rory_L]

Looking at the stills I was convinced this was a small lizard in the centimetres range, but when I watched the video clip I realised you intend it to be more of the Komodo Dragon scale, don`t you?

I think the model looks photo real: can`t see those texture errors you mentioned. The motion is pretty good too, but the tail looks a bit like you`ve got the tip goaled to a stationary point and that you`re just tugging the middle of the tail left and right. It`s a bit hard to explain, but it feels like the tip should be given more time to finish its full `flip` travel, before it`s dragged back the other way.

Do you have plans for this, or was it just an exercise?

Cheers,

R

[starbase1]

Hi, really good work, very impressive.

Minor suggestion - the head texture looks distinctly softer than the rest of the lizard - is it perhaps a lower resolution image map?

Nick

[cl1ff]

Thanks to all for the comments!

On the subject of toes... MJRoddy hit a good point. The foot should probably roll onto the ball and bend the toes slightly backwards before it lifts. I got a little lazy there and just used channel follower to bend the toes as the IK goal nulls move on the Y axis. It would be totally useless if I had the lizard walking on anything but the Y=0 ground plane; however, I needed to have some toe movement, so it wouldn't distract me while I tried to sort out multiple kinks in the IK setup. I couldn't think of a neutral pose to model the lizard in that was also good for IK bones. I'll attach the base pose to illustrate.

Blinblue, I think your right about the toes also. If i were to break up the heading angle a little it would reduce the obvious symmetry.:)

Starbase, the head map is actually the same resolution as the map for the whole body. There is more fine detail for closeups but, I think that I need to improve the bump and specular map for the head to bring out some clear definition in the longer shots.

Rory, you're mostly right about the size of the actual lizard. Columbian Black&White Tegus grow to about 3-5 feet in length. Their morphology however remains very similar to many kinds of small lizards. In captivity, they do sometime tend toward obesity (as do I), but I prefer the leaner look. I also feel that radiosity without a more dominant light source tends to make object appear small. That might just be me though. :D

I have been tweaking the tail motion, but I still don't have it quite right. I need to rethink the motion. I have been using a single goal for the end of the tail. Pulling the middle of the tail side to side would probably actually work better in conjuntion.

I made this mostly as an exercise. What I would like to do with it requires being able to change it from quadrupedal to bipedal motion. That is something I can't figure out with my current IK setup.

If anyone has a suggestion for a neutral pose that would lend itself better to bones and IK, I'd like to hear it.

[cl1ff]

Oops I forgot the neutral pose.

http://www.magic-media.com/images/TeguNeutral.jpg

[Rory_L]

You might try killing the IK in the tail and just grabbing all those bones at once, animating a swing to right and left; then staggering each function curve in the graph editor. We`ve been working on a dino game here; IK`s a bit of a luxury, so the animators have been using this technique.

R

[Cassanovastein]

The head and body maps seem to work against eachother. The head is smooth and has large spots and all the sudden (boom!) you get the body map which is high frequency and seriouslly bumpy. I'd like to see a quicktime (.mov for us Mac users) to see how you are avoiding map chatter issues.
The model itself is nearly photorealistic. Very nice.

[cl1ff]

Great advice on the tail, Rory! I almost had one of those "Eureka" moments. Just create a few simple keyframes, and then drag the times out in the scene editor (slightly easier than the graph editor.) I offset each of the 13 bones by 3 frames and viola (sp? sounds like a string instrument, but I digress.) I found that by keeping the last few bones keyed on the same frame, I got the exaggeration I wanted on the final whip.

Cassanovastein (Mystery Men reference?), there are a couple of things I should do to match the two maps a little better, but much of what you are noticing is just the nature of the beast, so to speak. These particular lizards have large, plate-like scales on their heads and then small, almost beaded scales on the body. Some of the difference is in the bump and specular maps for the head that I mentioned before, the natural scalation of this critter does play in there.

I'm not exactly sure of what you mean by "chatter." I got the two maps to match one another fairly well by adjusting the images/UV coordinates. I don't notice any aliasing at the seems if that's what you mean.

I will try to post a quicktime movie, but I always seem to have trouble finding the proper codec/compression combo to get a .mov file with the same quality as divx. Anyone have a suggestion.

Thanks again all!

[Cassanovastein]

What I meant is that usually when I render high density maps without a medium enhanced AA setting I usually get noise on the maps - chatter I guess is what most folks call it. I usually have to dumb down my maps for distance (Far and Medium shots) and save my high res images for CU shots.
I think that starbase1 commented earlier about the softness of the head map in the head. Look at the blacks in the body compared to the black backround in your latest post. They are the same darkest black tone. Your head map's darkest areas are basically medium brown.
This is a just the icing on the cake though - I said before that the model looks really good!
Cassanova Frankenstein? Heheh. Maybe Cassanova Eisenstein or Einstein would be even further off base. Yeah, I recognized your quote from Fear and Loathing. It's one of the few pieces of monologue that survived intact from the book - although it was kind of slapped on towards the end in the film.
Alright good work - take care, cl1ff.

[cl1ff]

I see what you mean now, Cass. I do need to finish up those particular issues on the maps, i.e. darkening some of the head, lightening and adding a brown color wash to some of the body. I haven't run into much aliasing problems, but those are sometimes obscured by the avi compression.

Thanks again for praise and comments. :D

I don't suppose you have any suggestions for .mov compression settings do you?

[Cassanovastein]

Mac and PC movie compression exchange is probably the single biggest area of confusion and uncertainty out there. But I've heard that 90% of the market is PC so most web encoded files get formatted as .avi's.
I don't know what software you may be compressing with besides LW. If you can render a (quicktime) .mov with Sorenson or Animation codecs at either 320x240 or even 160x120 size I can see this guy in motion. Do it for the 10 percenters!

[Rei]

I use Quicktime, even though I have a PC.

Soreson is the second best commpression I could find, DivX the best.

Rei

[cl1ff]

Okay, I compiled the anim into quicktime using Sorensen, and it looks pretty good. Oddly enough, the 320x240 version runs better but it larger in file size than the 640x480 version. Here are the links and thanks once more for the interest.:D

http://www.magic-media.com/images/WalkSmall.mov

http://www.magic-media.com/images/Walking.mov

[roguenroll]

incredible, all i can say.:)


Rogue

[3DBOX]

I really, really like it. I just got a buch of shots of my friends gecko to try and model it. anyway, I was thinking that the toes would drag a bit on the ground when stepping foward. Really cool anyway.

[cl1ff]

You might be right about the toes dragging. I have some reference video that I should check to be sure of the motion.

I'm toying with the idea of modelling the gecko from the Geico commercials and then having this one eat it. :D

Thanks very much, Rogue!

[Aquaman]

Awesome animation!