He's so Damn cool!

Damn this is so freaking cool… Just looking at this picture makes it all so worth the countless hours I have spent figuring all this crap out. Thank you, thank you, thank you Buzz and Zak.

As far as the texture goes there is a lot going on there. I played around with the ramp shader which has lots of options, and have a couple leather nodes being driven by fractal, noise, and luminosity samplers. From there I wanted to add in another bump to give lots of veins, but like I said before I need to move on. So I will make the changes if I find some extra time before the final render. Need to get on to the final project soon.

Last night was a bit more fun as I got into rigging the alien. Added a skeleton pretty much like Buzz’s for the body, but added some joints for the antenna and another for the jaw. This one started to get really complicated as I tried to figure out how to remove the rigid bind influence to add my own cluster until I noticed and remembered buzz saying that the rigid bind created clusters. Perfect. Opened up the paint cluster weights dialog, found the jaw cluster and started paining away. Also duplicated out my model (Which by the way kept pissing me off because I could translate it out of the way, but I figured out that I had to select the channels in the channel box, right click, and select the unlock option) . Here I added the blend deformers, and followed Buzz’s examples for rigging him up, just added a few more spline IKs for the antenna and his back as I did not want to animate every joint with as much as I am going to put into him.

All I have left to do is add back in the clusters for the blink, add all the controls to the Alien Control, and then start on the animatic. Like I said this is so freaking cool. :)