Freestyle Rendering

Got a shock to find this one staring back at me today.  Some wrongly connected nodes and textures giving a freaky render.

Here's a preview of the node graph I'm using to mix up the AO, Shadow, Flat Color and Freestyle Passes, otherwise known as the 'spaghetti system'.  It masks the freestyle pass using objects from the sets, edge detects to give a line round the shadows to match the Freestyle line, and adds a slight transparency to the characters when comping them over the backgrounds.  The backgrounds get a slight blurred underneath and just around where the characters are to help the characters stand out a bit.  I'm also mixing in ink and paper noise as freestyle's textured stroke rendering isn't supported yet in blender as far as I can tell.

I'm working with three Freestyle shaders (and a common functions module) which I coded based heavily on T.K.'s fantastic examples in the blenderartists thread.

I'll post the source when I've got them finalised.

Back to animating.

Spin me Right Round, Like a Record

Not 100% there with the look so far but it will probably do for the national gallery version.  I should have just animated the whole film like this with their feet sliding along the floor like this and everyone in their default T pose.  It would have saved time on the rigging and the animation would probably be just as good as it is now!

Cloth Sim for the Farmer's Coat

So manually animating the coat didn't go so well.  Instead I've created a low resolution version of the lower half of the coat mesh,  put the armature, then the sim on that, then a solidify modifier on top of that.  To connect the high resolution coat to the low resolution sim mesh I use the normal armature deform for the top half of the coat (arms etc), then use the low resolution mesh with solidify modifier as a mesh deform cage for the lower half of the coat.  You need to do all sorts of weight painting and multi-modifier tricks to get the two to play nicely together, then you need to have a doubled up copy of the armature for the coat with copy transforms otherwise you'll run into a dependency cycle (this depends on your rig of course).  If you're going to use cloth simmed objects linked into files as groups with proxied armatures you need to then link in the cloth sim object and the collision objects again after you've done your usual group linking.  Overly complex I know, but it works... just.

Rigging Done

He's multi coloured in proxy form to help me spot mesh intersections.  The coat was an absolute nightmare to rig but now I have a fairly nice fake wind effect using displacement textures and animated textures, all controllable at animation time.  Time to start animating.

Say What Again: Facial Rigging

I primarily designed this rig around subtlety of expression and emotional nuances, obviously.  First full 'stop staring' style rig I've built, quite happy with it so far.  I rigged his mop-top as well so I can push it out of the way when you need to see the brows.  Did the crow and the dogs facial rigs as well  and completed the bike rig yesterday (with moving chain) as well as working up a fake wind sim system using displacement modifiers.  Just the farmer to finish off with then animation with UV unwrapping on the side.

Click What? Wing Rigging Revisited

So a few weeks back I demoed a folding wing ring based on Jared Reisweber's notes.  It didn't look much like a crow though - it was more of a soaring wing type.  I spent most of today pushing verts around and working with shape keys to get the fold even better and solve the distortion problems at the extreme poses.  I'm using a solidify modifier post-armature on the feathers to take give them some thickness - I had to separate them out from the rest of the mesh after binding. Most of the above bones will be hidden at animation time leaving 4 main controls per wing and 8 tweaks for follow through and puffing out etc.  Not sure what I'm going to run with for simming yet - maybe just animated displacements.

Jonny's Fixie

Yes, I wish it was real too. Freestyle render in Blender 2.5. Not rigged yet.