Husnain's Blog

Initially, I created my own skeleton for my character, using just the joints; Using the left and right view, I tried to match up the character and its skeleton as best as I could. And when I felt like the joints were in decent places and everything matched up, I binded the skin to the joints. Alot of regular movements were okay, although some did not work well with the joints and needed fixing. When a rigged characters skin deforms you have to weight the skin to the bone so that the least amount of distortion would happen. But a lot of the movements this character would be doing looked okay. Since I wanted to finish this project I decided to leave out the weighting. If i could go back I would put in the extra time to finish this model completely. However, I ran into a problem when I finished rigging my character. When I exported the character into my scene. I had to resize it, but when I did the rig wouldnt resize, even if it was un-binded. This meant I had to rig my charact...

I render my scenes by changing the image format to AVI format, this would render the the scene in video, but uncompressed. This would make the file size quite large. After fixing the render settings I select the Batch render option. After this my scenes are rendered and are in video format.

To keyframe my scene I must use the timeline on the bottom of the program; I keyframed my character by moving the different joints at different keyframes; After keyframing my character I created my first scene. I created a camera and keyframed it at different points. I repeated these steps a few more times for each of my scenes.

Initially my scene looks like this; I added some volumetric fog to my scene using the content browser and searching for fog; Despite these changes I felt like the scene didn't look as good as I thought it was. I felt like the textures for some of the objects and also the trees and grass didn't match the cartoony look of some of the other models and so I changed most of the scene to be toon shaded, and also got rid of the grass and trees around the edges. And added more of the blocky cartoony trees. Now that the sky and mountains and floor are also toon shaded, the scene fits really well, I also got rid of some of the fog as I felt it was too much. I also put in another spotlight for where the sun is going to be. This spotlight will cast the shadows in the scene. I also import my character to the scene also. I will start keyframing my animation to record. Here is a snapshot of my scene.

With a lot of my scene done, I wanted to create a sky dome for the scene. This would emulate the sky, but also give the scene a look as though it is actually set outside when rendered through a camera. I did this by creating a sphere, then highlighting half of the faces and deleting them. I am left with a semi-sphere. I also invert the faces, so they are facing inwards. Towards the scene. I now find an image of the sky to texture my sphere. https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?24038-Free-high-res-skymaps-(Massive-07-update!)   I chose this image to use. To use this image I have to create a spherical map of this texture. To do this, in Photoshop, I have to distort the map from its polar coordinates, which is in the filter options; With the image distorted, I can apply this to the model, and now I have a sky texture. Here is a snapshot of the scene with the skydome. To get the snapshot, I also needed to add light to the scene. I did this by creati...

I wanted the same sort of cartoony look for the other models, I toon shaded both the temple and the trees I created and placed them within my jungle scene. Here the temple fits in decently, and the trees populate a decent enough area. I also wanted to create the chest for the top of the temple, I did this by creating a cube, then extruding the top part and adding some edge loops, I finished with my model for my chest; Thats the front and back of the chest, I then separated the different parts and toon shaded each of them in different colours; Here is the model textured.