A Bobcat That was 2 Years in the Making

I've finally finished making Bobby the Bobcat! For a while I thought he'd never be complete. But I've learned that while it may look like I abandon some projects, I always come back to them eventually. This goes for 2D art and CG work. I just can't stand starting something and not finishing it. But I think 2 years is the most I've let anything drag on. I think I let it go on for so long because school made me forget about him and college kept me too busy to work on him. But now that it's summer break I've been able to relearn/remember everything that I forgot about Blender (since I had been using Maya so much in college) and I was finally able to finish him. The confidence boost I got from my cute bunny turning out well also helped.

Here's a render of Bobby:

And a turntable:

And finally, here's his walk cycle:

He's a lot of fun to work with! I can't wait to do some more serious animations with him and with my bunny character!

You can download Bobby and see more images of him (including his wireframe and rig) here.

Until next time!

Bobby Speaks!

I just finished my first test animation with Bobby! It was a lot of fun animating him, especially his face (I've always loved animating to dialogue). It was a good test run of the rig, too. I found and fixed a lot of things. There are still a couple of things I need to fix, and I think I want to reduce the specularity on his nose, teeth, and tongue materials. I'm going to make another test animation that doesn't have any dialogue, so I can test his legs and torso.

Anyway, here's the animation:

I found this to be helpful when rendering it out:

Quick Tip: Rendering Animations (the proper way)

Until next time!

Bobby is Complete!

Well, I actually still have to do some little weight painting tweaks, so he's more like 95% complete. But that's complete enough to start making renders and animations. And the good thing is that making those will show me what areas need tweaking, so it all works out.

Bobby has a pretty advanced rig. His face is controlled by bones, which are actually drivers that control shape keys. He has IK/FK functionality for his whole body, and his tongue is controlled by bones outside of his head that can be scaled and moved about freely. In IK mode, his fingers are controlled by single bones that can be scaled to automatically curl them inward. Lastly, though this isn't really a rigging thing, his materials are set up so that he can be used with either the Blender internal renderer, or the Cycles renderer.

Here's a Cycles render of Bobby (slight post-work in Photoshop):

He's very happy to finally be out of that T pose! Here's what his finished rig looks like on the IK layer:

And here's what it looks like on the FK layer:

Here is a list of the tutorials I used. They're all very well done!

• Foot/Leg Rigging 
• IK/FK Leg Rigging 
• Spine Rigging 
• Face Rigging 
• IK/FK Arm Rigging 
• Hand Rigging 
• Alpha Mapping in Cycles 

I'm really happy with Bobby! It took a week of day and night work to rig him, but it was worth it! Now to make more test poses/animations and do the final tweaks. I'm also going to make him a walk and run cycle, a lip sync animation, and probably a pantomime animation. I'll post those on here when they're done. When I'm done with everything and Bobby's completely production ready, I'll make him available on Turbosquid.

Until next time!

Bobby Rigging Update

Hi, guys! Here's a quick update on the bobcat rig.

I've finished rigging his legs and torso. It took a lot longer than I had expected, but that's because I rigged him with some good, advanced tools. He has IK/FK functionality, and little important extras like foot roll and tumble controls, and knee pole vectors. Having used professional/semi-professional rigs in my animation class, I knew that I wanted those to be in his rig, to make animation easiest.

I really think that using other rigs is a great way to figure out what you'd like to include in your rigs, and what you wouldn't like. For example, I currently like facial rigs best if there are bones actually on the face for me to use, so I'm rigging Bobby's face in that way. I don't like having some big panel of sliders next to the face. It's not like that method is any less effective, I just don't enjoy animating with those rigs as much. Of course, this preference is just based off of one rig that had that sort of setup, so maybe other such rigs are better.

Here's a shot of the foot rig, without the tumble bones or custom shapes. It's pretty complicated (for me, anyway, since I didn't know how to rig extra controls before).

Here's a shot of the rig as it is right now, with x-ray on for the bones. Those extra shapes outside of the rig control the knees, foot tumble, foot role, and leg IK/FK. The spine's IK/FK does not have a control. Instead, you just switch visibility layers (you do this with the legs as well, the IK/FK control just helps switch the deformation bones around). I'm color-coding the bones into groups, which is why some of them are red.

And here's the rig with x-ray turned off. The controls are big enough for the rig to be animated in this way.

I'm currently working on giving him some gums (for some odd reason I never made him any, which I know from experience can lead to problems). Once I make those, I'm going to rig his face. When I'm all done rigging, I'll post a list of all the tutorials I used. There are a number of awesome people who recorded tutorials that helped me tons, and I want to give them credit.

Until next time!

Introducing Bobby the Bobcat

Well, the model is actually very gender neutral, so it could be a girl, too. But I started calling it Bobby a while ago, so now it's just a habit.

Originally, I was just going to post some stills of the model once I got his textures back on him, but instead I've got something better: a turnaround video. I found it when digging through my old files. It was made a little over two years ago, on February 15, 2010. Here it is:

I've got to make some tweaks to the model (some areas look too square), and then I'm going to get to rigging. The whole experience should be pretty interesting, since the last time I used Blender it was just 2.49b. Now it looks completely different. On top of that, I've been using Maya for months. I'm setting all my Blender presets to Maya, but that makes it a little difficult to follow some tutorials. Oh, well. I'll figure it all out.

Until next time!