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May 12, 2007

lsgl: baby's first steps

by sven at 10:50 pm

click on image to play clip (238 KB)

Very long day. But I did what I set out to do: I got an Elder Thing to walk. Badly.

(Given the level of difficulty, "badly" was actually the plan.)

naked Elder Thing

Here's what the Elder looks like while I'm animating it. It turns out that I won't be using the "Hot Dog on a Stick" model -- but color-coding the stuff that's ultimately going to be invisible has been a great boon.

The problem I'm wrestling with is still how to get this model rigged correctly. Once it has a decent CG armature inside of it, I think I can get an acceptable performance out of the critter. ...But I'm not there yet.

click on image to play clip (181 KB)

I want to show you one of the earliest clips I rendered -- so you can understand just how bad a "walk" can really be.

feet in a knot

Here's another amusing error. The lower legs were wanting to flip outward... In the process of trying to correct that problem, I managed to twist the feet right into knots.

click on image to play clip (163 KB)

This is the best walk I made today. It's the same one that's in the color clip at the top.

For the sake of quick turn-around while rendering out test clips, I used "quickshade" instead of "realistic." I was only focusing on the legs today -- didn't touch the arms, didn't add the eyeballs. I didn't work on getting the weight (the up and down) of the torso right, or have it lean forward at all. And I didn't even bother to pick the feet up off the ground -- they just shuffle along.

That's stuff I can deal with... The things that I'm really fighting with are:

I'm not really sure how to proceed next. Maybe I'll spend some time on the shoggoths tomorrow...

posted by sven | May 12, 2007 10:50 PM | categories: let sleeping gods lie