Ameliorations never ends. Since last version, I’ve upgraded the dorsal reactor (Left : Before; Right : After).
I found the previous one was nice but a little simple. This one is much more detailed.
I’ve spent a lot of time on this for two reasons :
- I wanted something as intricated as the rest of the armor.
- Blender 2.5 changed a lot of shortcut keys and often crashed on me when using the “solidify” modifier.
And here is what it gives on the whole character in preview mode.
I forgot to mention that I worked on upgrading the whole armor too.
Added more details like synthetic muscles bundles…
Animation wise it… sucks? I still have to work on that…
As for the physics dynamic it looks great. Greater than what I would have obtained if I had to manually animate each bricks myself.
But it suffer from lack of control…
First you can’t activate Bullet only when you need it. Hence the Jello effect in the beginning, as the physics engine is fighting to find an equilibrium. A button to activate deactivate physics keying would be nice.
If you could just activate it when the character hit the wall for example…
Then it produces a massive load of action keys. It almost crash blender each time I switch to IPOs or Action editor… But it would be nice to vizualise both Physics and Armature actions without freezing the software. I had a hard time coordinating the punch animation and the actual “brick falling dynamic” because of that.
Adjusting the timestep vs. frame ratio would be interesting also for slow motion things.
Well. Quite happy for now. But if you have advices to make this better, I’m listening…
Is that impressive enough now? (fortunately, wearing a power armor does have some advantages…)
It also shows that some part of the armor really need more details, but I would really like to advance in learning how to animate this kind of characters…
What with the work (I’ve been sent oversea), and the holidays (had fun oversea too)…
Anyway… While I was working on animating the character, I ran into a problem… The wrist…
I had not taken into account the twisting abilities of the arm and wrist, hence the armor felt all wrong…
It might be a fantasy armor, but if it does not fit, you must … ?
… work on it. Again.
And again.
Here is the latest result. Using the medieval armorcraft as guidance, I made a pair of protective gloves for the wrist only. It also allows free twisting of the wrist while maintaining protection.
I am quite happy with the result so far… maybe I could make it look more techy… adding some glowing stuff on it instead?
I have worked mainly on the skeleton that’s why apart from some slight external changes in the hair and the completion of the boots, there doesn’t seems to be much difference…
But skeleton-wise, I’m getting closer to an armature rig that I could use to animate the character…
Just have to work on the feet… there is some special adjustments to do if you wish to use the rig for animation…
Things to do :
Finish and details face texture (or maybe I could reuse Blackboe’s texture from the previous version of the knight…)
