[WIP] Leviathan - Mouth and Biceps

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.

[WIP] Leviathan - Better Texture

So after the arduous process of adjusting Leviathan's geometry so it's not royally messed up, I finally got to UV mapping (successfully) and texturing (semi-successfully) the big spirit. I say semi-successfully because I need to mess around with the shaders to figure out how to make the fin and webbing translucent and make the designs glow and maybe some other stuff. Anyway enjoy Leviathan's final design.

PS: Don't ask why the render's are fuzzy. I don't know, I was playing around with the settings on the shader and don't know what specifically caused the fuzziness. I'll have to mess around to figure that out.

[WIP] Leviathan - Design Update

Just some progress shots on Leviathan's model. I'm not sure if I want to call his design finished or not. I envisioned him as sort of a mix of sea creatures, but right now he's just killer whale, sail fish, and cat fish with some arms and rear flipper fin things.

[WIP] Leviathan - Rework

This may seem like a step back, since this is an un-textured, un-rigged Leviathan, but I wasn't happy with the original mesh. So, I went back to an older version and deleted a bunch of stuff and reworked it. It's much better now; it was mainly his arms and hands but they look much better now. 

Oh, and also, his mouth looks a lot better. This is kind of weird but I am proud that I made something that looks like a realistic mouth sans teeth and a tongue of course, but those might be separate models.

[WIP] Leviathan - Texture

So managed to work out the UVs and did a rough 3D paint texture for Leviathan's base coloring. I think he definitely needs more design to him, but I'm not 100% sure at the moment.

Although you can see the texture seems in the second pic. I'm sure that'll be gone when I do a real texture. I hope.

[WIP] Leviathan - Full Mesh and Skeleton

So I forgot to upload some picks after finishing the full mesh for Leviathan, or the rough mesh, anyway. And it's all in the glorious mental ray rendered, or the settings I had to refind since I couldn't on the last set of pictures.

Of course, because I forgot that means I've done some more work, I spent my last two free days setting up his skeleton and painting skin weights. So now I've got a fully posable whale spirit.

Now, he is missing some eyes and some teeth and probably a tongue as well as any extra frills I may want to add to make him a bigger mix of sea creatures, but that'll be later. My next step is to properly unwrap his UV's and then make a high res version of him that I can to do a normal map on. Then I can texture him. Of course, I need to learn how to do those, so that might take a bit. But once that's done, I can make some scenes with him. It'll be cool.

[WIP] Leviathan

This may not seem like much, but this is actually pretty exciting. I found Maya 2016 for free, with seemingly no draw backs. So, I'm getting back into the game, so to speak, and I'm happy to say this is still pretty easy for me. This is about an hour's worth of work and it already looks like a whale. (Well as much a whale as what this thing is going to be actually is, but you get the idea.)

See whale thing. Actually, I'm planning on turning this into my world's Leviathan (who had a bit of a redesign from when I drew him with Sakura, who coincidentally also had a redesign). So should be fun.