Final Project part 13: Finished Bird Character

Apologise for not blogging in a while, just focusing on finishing my bird. Working on my bird was no walk in the park, it was really troublesome to make sure the bird will move perfectly when I animate him. I first began UV mapping him so I can add some extra textures on his body, wing, beak, tongue and feet if needed, then I layered out the joints.

When I was placing the joints on my bird I wanted to have a lot of control on every part of his body, from moving the body to controlling the wing and tail feathers. This is so when the bird is moving I will give it an extra bounce when moving the tail feathers. I used some locaters to mark out the places for where my joints will sit. 

Skinning the model was also hard and time consuming because I had to make sure my bird will not look blocky when bending.Placing the controllers was also tricky because I have to make sure the controls will rotate nicely and will not act funny when using it.  

The next two images shows off the blend shapes that are used on my model and the cluster shape that I used to make the blend shapes.

While I was making the blend shapes for the bird's mouth I notice that whenever he opens his mouth he looks funny, evidence of this can be seen in the next two images when both mouth blend shapes are at 50%.

Failed Open Smile Blend Shape 

 Failed Open Sad Blend Shape

I have experimented some different ways to fix this, sorry I don't have any pictures to show my progress on how I solve this problem. The way I solved it was to make an open mouth blend shape and have it controlled by the lower beak control. The result was a success, as proven by my next when the mouth blend shapes are at 50% again.

Open Mouth Blend Shape 

 Open Mouth Blend Shape on Bird Model

 Better Open Mouth Smile

 Better Open Mouth Sad 

 To end this post I will show a previs on one of my birds blend shape where his stomach expands and contract, this is meant to represent the worm singing inside the birds tummy. 


Bird Body Blend Shape Previs
  
 That is all I have to show for now, in the future I will start animating my animation while also texturing the bird and making the scenery, wish me luck.