Animation Direction AM50309 - 6: Week 4

I now started to think about the design of the main island. Knowing that I wanted to keep it simple to avoid long rendering times, I decided to use a basic cube polygon, and then sculpt it in Mudbox.

In Mudbox, I applied basic bulging on the edges on top to make it look more rock like. I also added a few bulges at the bottom to make it look like it's floating off the ground. After I did this, I created the textures on top using basic mapping, and then exported the texture maps into photoshop like I did with the palm tree and Fishbone's textures.

Overall I'm happy with the way the island looks, and I plan to eventually include a pond in the hole as well using dynamics to create a waterfall. If I had more time I would probably make the bottom look slightly more defined.

This week has also given me the opportunity to work on the coconut character. As it's a simple sphere, it would be quite quick to model and rig.

For the coconut's eyes, I wanted to give the impression that they are etched onto its surface. To do this, I decided to use a similar technique to making blend shapes, except this time I utilised images instead. To do this, I created a texture map and then created eye expressions       

in Photoshop.

Once I finished the different expressions, I saved each layer separately as tiff files and then mapped them to the top half of the coconut. I then created a new item in the channel box named eye expressions and keyed each expression to the channel.

Image Sequence

Normal

Crazy

Eyes Closed

Once this was finished I added the blend shapes to the top mouth. I felt that this would make the animation slightly easier. Adding these blend shapes was relatively easy, and I plan to use them in the final animation.

Blend Shapes

Left

Back

Top

Front