Well it's been a bit since I posted something about Leviathan, so have some shots of his new and improved mouth. He now has teeth (that move with the jaw) and a tongue (that's animate-able and also moves with the jaw). There's also an improved mouth texture to boot.
It's not just his mouth that I can move around though; his entire body has somewhat proper skin weights applied. It probably could be better, but it took me forever to do them and now I'm working on making sure the body deforms properly while he moves, or at least the arms, since there are more obvious muscles in there. This next series of pics, demonstrates some of that work.
So I didn't want to batch render out a good animation for this, so hopefully it's noticeable, but Leviathan's bicep bulges when as his arm moves. It took me forever, fiddling around with Maya's tools to get that to happen. At first, I tried Maya muscles, but that was horrible, so I'm having to work with Blend Shapes, which means I have to sculpt everything to look perfectly. I actually had to do this for these biceps three times.
The first time looked pretty good (even if I did forget to have the triceps stretch), but Maya glitched out and made the deformer mesh vanish before I had applied it to the other arm, I couldn't get it back. The second time, I forgot to make sure my deformer mesh was still applied to a skeleton so I could bend it back into the appropriate position after I finished modeling it. That one also looked somewhat good. This third time though, Maya decided that it wanted to snap all the vertices I was smoothing all over the place, so it didn't look as good, but I got the dang thing working on both arms, so there's that. Anyway, the stretch position is next, then the shoulders, then wrists, then who knows, maybe I'll try to do some jiggle physics so when he moves around all that blubber shakes.
