• Dear NewTek ( now Vizrt) community,
    We are merging and updating our forum to join it with the Vizrt Forum. Here's what you need to know:
    All existing threads, posts, knowledge articles, and user accounts will be seamlessly migrated.
    Once the merge is completed, the old forums will no longer be accessible.
    We are making this move to unite our Vizrt and NewTek forums, creating a new, enhanced experience for our community members and technology users.
    We will notify you once the change has been made and the new forum is live.
    Thank you for your continued support in our growing community!

To be painted with aura.

stoehr

New member
Armored_12.jpg

Armored_11.jpg

sentryStats.jpg
 
Last edited:
excellent model, the details is great. how about another view to show a profile? love the nose ring! what is the poly count on that beast?

what is it before i get into trouble guessing?:D
 
Hey Rabid:
The character is a sentry. I'm not as defensive of this guy, because it doesn't look similar to anything in the mainstream film right now.

It is based on a rotwhieler. This character is the gate keeper the princesses (the antaganist) castle. The have a serious animosity towards humans, so the collection of human skulls determines their status in command and the amount of respect they recieve from others of their kind.

I have yet to add the skulls to the armband. This guy is the baddest, ofcourse, and has the special acknowledgement of the princess and her father.
 
nice renders

that is really a cool idea. this guy is quite evil, needs some skulls that are decomposing if you want a challange.;) Do you have access to a network? 15,000 sub-d polys would be pretty dreadful to animate on my system.:rolleyes: I guess it doesn't matter when you have a vision in your head(or on paper). What is going on with his back, are those horns or his ears? Only critique is that his calves seem a little odd, a sort of crease in the middle.

Now i have a question reguarding the armor. I have tried in the past to put armor on a character, but have had 0 luck getting it rigged. First of all are they seperate objects, or extruded from the main object? Secondly how do you create a rig that will maintain the solid structure of armor? Do you drive seperate bones from the legs? I have actually tried to create sholder pads, and this was a problem. Any hints?
 
No, unfortunatley, I don't have a network. I work on one machine with Dual AMD 1600+ (1.43 Ghz), 1.5GB Ram, and Quadro 2 chipset in my video. It works great for this right now, but by the time I'm done with MD, particles, textures, and anything else, it'll be awhile for it to render. Your right too, it doesn't really matter to me, since I have consciously decided not to let the limitations of hardware control my ideas and aesthetics. Hardware speed will catch up to my ideas eventually.

Those are horns, ramming horns, on his back. He has tiny ears above his eyes. Thanks for the calf observation, I'll fix it.

The armor pieces are all seperate from the body and seperate to themselves. I modeled the roughed out form of the armor from splines, then patched the splines, then edited the geometry like I would the body of the character. I also use subpatch weights to "blend" between sharp edges and soft forms. Sometimes, like for the armband, I'll just select the existing loop of polys, then copy and paste to another later, then edit the geometry normally to make the armband. It was faster than building splines. I like to build the armor/clothes seperately. You can control the mesh individually from the body, maybe a lower poly count too, and the armor, clothes, won't look like a wet suit. (I'm not trying to make skin tight sexy characters, like we normally see online).

I intend to animate the armor with bones, and with intelligently placed hierarchies and usages of follower and parenting I will have an armor structure "adhere" to the body and flow as the body moves. For certain "stiffer" forms, like the gauntlets, i could get away with just parenting it to the forearm bone. With something more flexible like the upper leg pads, I would use parenting and follower, maybe I'll even try experimenting with MD.

I'll post a schematic of the hierachies later. Just remind me.
 
Last edited:
Wow went to TVpaint those textures look even better ,I can now see why you didn't give in to pressure when we asked you to make his/her eyes more pronounced.A very wise choice keep going we are watching with interest Abe
 
Abe said:
Wow went to TVpaint those textures look even better ,I can now see why you didn't give in to pressure when we asked you to make his/her eyes more pronounced.A very wise choice keep going we are watching with interest Abe


Thanks for looking Abe! I'm sorry I haven't written in awhile, but I have been spending all my time on this animation. Mostly experimenting with rigging techniques. I think I have a good setup and approach to the Sentry's armor. I bought Motion Builder, and the realtime feedback is great, and it has also made me rethink how I approach bones in LW.
Rapid Pitbull: After using Motion Builder I can clearly explain how I would do the same thing in LW, but I'll be making most of my animation in MB because of the Realtime feedback. There's nothing like seeing your results immediately, especially when setting up complex expression driven rigs. Most importantly, I'm trying to avoid using Motion Designer for the armor, because it's just too slow!

I'm glad you like the troll! Currently, I've stopped working on him and I have focused all my attention on the Lady and the Sentry.

Look for a major update to my site in about three weeks (beginning of August). I'll have new images, schematics, text explanations, biographies of the artists, and other great things.
 
Will do and carn't wait to see it,I also appreciate how busy you are,time seems to go nowhere these days.Thanks for the reply Abe
 
Back
Top Bottom