Yes, I figured I would do a little introduction being the first time I’ve officially posted. I’m Australian, which means right now I can look out my window at 5pm and see sunshine after having a large bbq lunch with some mates eariler on today. No shrimp though…

On to business.

The latest large job we worked on was to create a digital catwalk model, dress them in 10 pre-designed outfits, rig and then animate them. Easily the largest job I’ve worked on so far. I have to say it was a lot of fun, particularly when answering the question ‘What did you get up to on the weekend?” with “Modelling for a fashion parade.” I helped with modelling the outfits a bit, but my main tasks in the three person pipeline of sorts was the rigging and animation.

We used a character that I have been working on for quite some time as the model and were quite fortunate that she more or less matched the description of the clients. This saved us a lot of time and effectively saved the clients money too. (I’m working on a default male character too, more on that in a bit.)

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=117247 – The main thread for the character, including the rigged .blend for download. Will post the file here directly when she is deemed ‘finished’ for a full public release.

With that in mind, we jumped straight to modelling the outfits around the character and the rig itself held up quite well using ‘bone heat weight’ with the exception of hips and shoulders which I went back and manually painted for the outfits. One thing that the other two don’t even know yet is that because I sent the default unclothed model to them in a pose different to the default rigged T-pose, I had to manually edit the clothes back into a T-pose before they would rig properly. Being my fault in the first place, I just chugged along with the work. I ended up cheating a bit for time reasons with the rigging by adding a bone or two to some outfits around the hips where I could just ‘pull’ parts of the outfit out at certain frames to avoid making shape keys and other time intensive rigging. Also, in many cases I deleted out the torso part of the character mesh under the clothes to avoid overlap. Although the character mesh itself has many shape keys, deleting faces wasn’t a problem in Blender. It is when you go to add them that it usually kicks up a fuss.

Animation. I have some animation experience, but it would be fair to say I am still learning. Fortunately, I have a copy of ‘The Mancandy FAQ’ which as it turned out proved crucial in finishing this project on time. (No real room for extension when the Fashion Show has a set date.) The system I had in the end was one large .blend file with 10 identical paths on layers, with one outfit per layer. The camera would follow a separate set of keyframes that were the same for each outfit/segment. The rigged clothed character would then go through one of 5 intro animations (swimming/crawling/etc as requested by the client) a transition animation into the walkcycle and then the walk cycle. The walk was constrained to the path for direction and timing of movement.

I was pretty proud of getting it all to work at the time.

This large file (180mb) compressed quite well (down to 20mb I think) which I sent to JS to render. It has given us a fair bit to think of in terms of an international 3 person pipeline for larger projects, but for now we are all glad it worked.

Where to next?

Well, there are a few various smaller things we are keeping busy with, but one I am quite excited about personally is the chance to test some webcam based motion capture software. This is where my male character comes in to play.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=141638 – WIP thread.

Having a ‘default’ female character who was rigged and textured came very much in handy, so I figured a male counterpart would also provide at least a good starting point for similar future projects. I’ve already been able to implement a few things that are a little late to work into my female character without starting from scratch. For starters, he will mainly be rigged using a mesh deform cage, which will simplify many things and also allow me to make changes to the modelling without affecting the rigging.

There is a reasonable amount to see in the thread already if you are interested, including rendered motion capture tests, a lighting setup for download and some still renders.

Cheers,
Ben.