所有类别 - Lachlan Best - Rigger and Modeller

The Belvedere Double

4/1/2015

Been forgetting to add this to the archives for a while now... introducing my final year undergraduate film, "The Belvedere Double." I finished work on this around about November 2013. I spent eight months on the short doing everything from script writing and pre-vis through to post-production on my lonesome, getting tripped up at just about every obstacle on the way. It was a fantastic experience. Sure, there were a heap of 3am bedtimes with 6am wake-ups, but it forced me into a lot of corners where I had to step out of my comfort zone to learn something new, and was a good gauge on how far I could push myself and still manage to function as a normal human being.

There's a whole pile of amateur-level things going on - the stiff animation (courtesy of my terrible old rig), the poor pacing, the weak ending - but I'm proud of it for what it is. I went back and tried to fix a few of these problems after I'd finished the version uploaded below, but ran out of steam. I replaced the weird modern hubcap in the intro with a 50's era one, and modelled, rigged, and animated some crows squawking and carrying on outside the windows in the first two shots, but after all that I ran into some major headaches with the render farm and decided to just call it a day.

Big thanks to Darren Whyte for capturing and adding sound to the short! You can see more of Darren's work here: https://soundcloud.com/static-structures

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New Character!

28/12/2014

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Just completed a schmick new character to practice more cartoon-style rigging and deformation with! The piece is based of a concept by the very talented José Manuel Fernández Oli, who you can see more of at nibbledpencil.com/index.php Took me about three weeks to do working on and off between other projects. Went for a diffuse only texture, following the workflow presented by Valve for texturing DOTA assets (http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2CharacterTextureGuide.pdf). Only major detour I took from the workflow was using primarily ZBrush to paint on textures, before baking the vertex colours out of xNormal and integrating into my main psd. Was a fantastic workflow to get into - I'm thinking for my next character I'll follow a similar style, but tackle a more simple model that can be built faster so I can put more focus back onto my technical skills...

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Chugging Along

17/12/2014

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More work with head sculpts. Started experimenting with fibermesh inside ZBrush, pretty fun stuff. For shorter hair, it feels pretty easy to get something decent in a few minutes, but still haven't got the hang of longer stuff. Sculpted a few female heads using fibermesh for the hair, but all of them looked like they'd just climbed out of bed with the mess that was happening up top.

Working on a stylized character to put all this facial sculpting into practice, and to build my toon rigging skills! Aiming to have the character model finished before new years, see how it goes...

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Even More Head Sculpts

4/12/2014

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More sculpts! Been having fun with these, pushing out into some more diverse territory and creating some busts from concept art instead of photo reference. Also started using Marmoset Toolbag to render the sculpts again. I had tried this with the first few busts I did, but it was kind of like trying to polish a turd... why bother wasting time in Marmoset trying to spruce it up when it looked terrible to begin with. Now that I feel I'm at a somewhat decent level, I'll probably continue to use Marmoset to render instead of plain old zBrush screen grabs since it does look a whole lot more presentable.

Also had a crack at hard-surface work in zBrush and found it to be extremely time consuming, but I'm glad I have an idea of the workflow required now. The robot bust took 5 days to do, working for about 3-4 hours each day. Rendered using BPR in zBrush and composited in Photoshop. Followed Ben Douglas's fantastic YouTube series to arrive at the final result You can check out Ben's tutorials at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB1ZZHlDT7o Highly recommended for an introduction to hard-surface with zBrush!

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More Head Sculpts

12/11/2014

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Been keeping myself busy after finishing my honours year (phew!) by doing some more head sculpts. Monday to Friday, I've been starting the day with a two hour sculpt to get me warmed up. Recently I've been getting more into polypainting and facial expressions to keep myself interested. Thinking about developing one head further, and doing a base sculpt plus a sneer, smile, frown and so on, and turning it into a blendshape facial rig to tie my love of sculpting and rigging together. Think I need some more practice first, but its definitely on the cards!

Also I'm still terrible with female faces, but I'm working on it...

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New Site and Sculpts

11/9/2014

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Hey! Just finished updating my portfolio website, needed a bit of a makeover to accommodate for the new work I wanted to post up. I'm not much of a web developer so Weebly (shameless plug) has been a great tool for me to create something presentable with little effort.

Here are some sculpts I've been doing over the past few months to get the artistic mind brewing. I've done just under 50 head busts, most of them are absolutely terrible, so I've cherry picked a few of the juiciest ones. No females, but hopefully next time I update this I'll have a few that aren't an eyesore to show. For these, I've grabbed some reference images off Google/Pintrest and then gone to town trying to get a likeness in ZBrush. They don't end up looking a whole lot like the original reference but eh, gotta start somewhere.

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Dipping into Scripting

26/3/2014

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Over the past week and a half I've been slapping together a script for personal use for a games project I'm currently working on. The breif calls for around 8 fully rigged bipedal characters completed within the next few months. Thankfully none of them are full on, only basic functionality needs to be implemented. No facial rigging necessary, although one or two might need one so they can be posed for promotional images. I could have jumped onto CreativeCrash and used one of the many fantastic auto-rigging scripts found on there, or used Maya's built in Human IK system and be over and done with this in a day, but I guess I didn't want to 'cheat' myself when theres so much to learn from doing it yourself. I've had some background using c# during the course of university, and thought this would be the perfect excuse to actually put some of it to use. So I decided to start simple, and just completed my first significant MEL script that automates the process of setting up and rigging arm and leg chains. After rigging the first two characters for this project it became immediately obvious that spending anymore time repeating these steps would be a waste of time, so set out to automate it. I found 'The Art of Rigging: Volume 1' by CG Toolkit provided a good spring-board to get started, but once I'd written the first couple of procedures the rest came naturally. The script is by no means elegant, but it gets what I need done in a fraction of the time.

Next up, I think it might be good to work out how to automatically create a IK/FK stretchy spine setup, or how to generate a series of FK controls along a joint chain of any length, like in jbuck's neat script "The Rigging Toolbox." (www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/the-rigging-toolbox) Not because I'm too cheap to buy it, but to learn how it's done. At least thats how I justify myself.

You can download my script, "autoLimbRigger" for free from CreativeCrash at:
www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/autolimbrigger

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Forward>>

The Belvedere Double

New Character!

Chugging Along

Even More Head Sculpts

More Head Sculpts

New Site and Sculpts

Dipping into Scripting

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