A quickie project but fun

[Belseth]

I haven't posted anything in months so I thought I'd send this along. It was a 12 hour wonder, concept to 200 frames of animation rendered. The sketch on the far left was from the client, the one in the middle was the final model and the one on the far right is the last frame of the animation. I did the basic model in Lightwave but did the final shaping in Zbrush. I find that the lower res Zbrush models work fine in the current version of Lightwave. It's when you get over a couple of hundred thousand polygons that the problems start showing up, start sacrificing goats after a million polys. Hopefully the new version of Lightwave will fix that. I never could have finished it that fast and kept it from looking like Gumby without Zbrush. At first I viewed it as for highly detailed models but I use it 90% of the time for low res. I just have far more control over the shape in Zbrush. Couldn't live without it!
Ping-comp-with-ref.jpg (javascript:zb_insimg('21491','Ping-comp-with-ref.jpg',1,0))

[mattybyng]

I really like this guy...he's just got that look to him.
Good stuff.

And did you use Lightwave to pose?

[Belseth]

Yeah the animation was all Lightwave. Most of it was with nulls but the arms I had to leave free and of coarse the fingers. I'm a big fan of using nulls for things like controling shoulders and hips. Obviously also for things like eyes and the antenae. I always lock the null to a related body part then set the null a foot or two in scale in front or behind the character so I just have to click on it to swing the hips and shoulders. Just set the bone or object to match goal orientation and use rotation to manipulate it. Speeds things up and you don't really sacrific control. The one thing I wish you could do is reverse direction of rotation. Kind of like servo reverse in radio control. It'd be handy for the actual shoulder bones. I'd like to be able to set a null up so when I rotate it two different bones would rotate in opposite directions. That way you could use one null to hunch both shoulders or swing them back. I'm sure a plug-in could be written or an L Script but I'm not into code.