seagull is next

so i decided upon a background character to add populous without doing too much

so the model took about a day in all as it is a very simple smoothed shape the beak and eyes are separate to the mesh so they can be easily weighted.

the rigging took a further 3 days.

it wasnt too challenging as i rigged the character using the same techniques that i have done for simple humanoid rigs before. so the legs are ik and the wings are an attempt at FK which i havnt done before. i believe it works really well and will upload a video shortly showing a demonstration. the weights were the hardest thing to do and as such is where the rig falls down as any extreme movements will cause a lot of tearing. i am very proud of this though as i have wanted to test my skills this year and as such i have produced a usable character.

features include:

reverse foot

fk arms

ik legs

fk spine and neck.

problems - when i skinned and weighted the character i had not textured the character yet. i went to texture the character after the rig was complete and to my horror after UV'ing the character the textures would not stay attached to the character so i proceeded to do the usual delete history which inturn deleted the weights that had taken 2 days to produce. noooooooo.

to get around this i decided not to back track due to time but instead i compromised. i simply selected polygons and created simple block colour shaders with no textures. this will work due to the simplicity of the character. hopefully but lesson learned

UV map the character before you rig as the weights are painted on to the uvs lesson learned.