I would like you to meet someone

Meet the family. I have created Mr, Mrs and Junior (who is unisex so he/she can be a boy or girl).

They have now all been bones, rigged and skinned and are ready to be animated. I have colour coded the bones because they are going to be duplicated a lot for the beach scene and when animating all the bodies will be hidden, just the bones will show so my poor computer doesn't have a heart attack, this way will make it easier for me to identify who is who.

I'm gonna start easy tho, just these three in my boat scene, maybe i will include some facial animation if I'm feeling brave.

character modeling

This is a (very) brief timeline of the process I have gone through to build my first charecter for my animation, this will be the child on the boat.

It began life as a box the same size as the torso and I extruded individual polys to make the arms, legs and the feet. then I used the slice tool to add additional vertices around the edge of the shirt and sleeves, i then scaled them to smaller and pulled them under the sleeves etc to make them look like the edge of the clothing.

When it comes to applying the texture, as i plan to use the same model over and over, I am going to assign all the individual polys with material ID's so that I can use the Multi/Sub material to easily change their clothes. but that is a way off yet (time is not on my side, dam this obsession with perfection).

You may of notice the lack of head! Well the body took about 6 hours and the book I am using to do this went on for an entire chapter to do the entire body, shoes, arms, fingers, torso legs clothes, all in a chapter, now there is a whole chapter on the head on its own so I reckon its gonna be a long night.

I have been trying to get the flag for the top of my boat to 'flap' properly in the wind whilst the boat creates a nice wake on the water as it speeds by, all goes well so far. I think in the wake video I have finally managed to get the sea to look just right, its defiantly the right colour of murky to be British.

Pier comming along nicely

A bit empty at the moment (bit like my beach)

Something is wrong here, it’s well nice down there on the beach and there is not a British person in sight! (I guess I should probably get on and create them really, anyone else starting to fell like they are playing god here?)

I have been working on my scene and trying to make the sea do as I want it to and this is my first test render. Still needs a lot of work but its getting there