Over Easter, our goal was the get all our characters/ props modelled for going back to uni so we could really just focus on animating. Ellie made a milanote where we could put all our concepts and research in with our own categories so I put all mine in:

 

During the first week I decided to try nail down my model. I began making it in blender using a few references such as the concept art I drew, references of train conductors and also a few blender tutorials on YouTube!

 

As I was getting on to the clothes, I realised I wasn’t really liking the way my model looked. Janet had also messaged how it was recommended for us to use blender 3.5 so I just decided to redo my model. When I began re-modelling my character, the clothes started to get a little difficult for me to make so I used a YouTube tutorial to try help me. This is what my model was looking like:

 

As I began to UV map, I realised that the subdivision modifier was making it a lot harder for me than I thought, as well as the collar, buttons and vest (so basically everything :’)). I remade his clothes and I liked them to look more ‘blocky’ as I think it made my ghost look kind of cute! This is what he looks like:

 

 

Then I started texturing him on substance. I realised parts of his body were looking kind of glitched (?) so I went back into blender to try identify my mistake – turns out I had a duplicate body for him and forgot to hit the ‘selected objects only’ button for exporting as a fbx. I had my model all textured and looking the way I wanted him to, however, I noticed that there were a few spots where the texture didn’t seem to work so I messaged in discord and got a lot of help from Alec! I learnt that my UV’s were really small and also some faces were laying on top of each other, so I had to deleted the faces under his clothes instead of just modelling them on top of the model itself. For his final design, I noticed that conductors seemed to have some sort of tag or metal part at the top of their hat with a design, so I used Krita to draw up a design and made a stencil in substance. This is what my final model looks like:

 

 

Now it came to rigging; I found this difficult. I had trouble with moving parts of the body as the clothing would stick out and end up not parenting to the armature, it would say that there was a ‘heat weighting issue’.

 

 

Because of this, I used weight painting to try to get the clothes to sit right every time a body part moved. To do this, I kept posing my models in different ways to see what part of the clothes were messing up; it was mainly the shirt and vest as they wouldn’t move with the arms. Whenever I tried to make my model bend or move his head, the shirt would glitch through the vest or the vest would glitch through the body.

 

I was really struggling with it as no matter what I tried it didn’t seem to work so I watched a YouTube video for help on weight painting just to see what places should be painted and this seemed to do the trick!

 

I also added armatures for the eyes of model but I didn’t want to go to in detail as my character wasn’t going to be in the animation for too long. It also wouldn’t work with the armatures so I ended up watching Mike’s videos on shape keys and using them to try do the facial animations for the eyes! I ended up getting the eye rigs working using shape keys. It was challenging as I forgot to make 2 separate vertex groups for each eye, but after this I ended up getting it right. I changed the graph editor to *50 to get it to fit!

After this was finished, I went back to double check that my pose was working for my whole model and it ended up, the heat weighting got messed up so I had to re-do it all. First, I started with the heat and neck however, when it came to weighting, if I added weight to the head bone and tried to add weight to the neck bone in the same place, it would overwrite it, so I messaged Alec to see what was going wrong!

Alec showed me that my bone placement wasn’t great and recommended that I change a few parts of it. I watched all the videos that he sent me so I finally got my model rig fixed! I went through and just moved different bones about to try see if it was definitely finished and saw that the tail was messing up the buttons of the vest and the pockets. I fixed it using the vertex groups; this is what I set it to and what it looked like:

This is the full turnaround of my model! (GIF)

 

For the end of this week and before our class for getting back after easter, I decided to update our PowerPoint with a few of my designs and my character. I also wanted to add in some tests I done just to make sure the rig was definitely working. (GIF)

I also decided to do a few props for our animation. I first started off with a book; I textured it in substance.

 

I also quickly drew out a ticket for the train! I was thinking about it sitting on the booth table – it would be pretty small so not much detail needed to go into it:

 

I then made a can using cylinders and extruding parts to get the shape of it. I also used the boolean modifier to cut out circles for the drinking part at the top! I drew the little details for the can in Krita and I changed the colour so I could make versions of them.

To get ready for our presentation, I sent in a word doc of our story with different parts highlighted so we could all pick each part we wanted to do and asked everyone which part they’d prefer to do!