Finally, an update on the tale of Licorice Merlin! Most of the modeling was complete on Merlin last weekend but I was delayed in posting this due to some concerns about his robe. More on that later - let's start with the creation of the model.
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| Merlin's humble beginning - the source curves and extrude settings used to create the base licorice stick |
Since this model was so geometric and I wanted to keep my edge flow very specific for animating I started this model in Maya. At his core Merlin is a 6 sided star shape extruded (with a twist) to form a licorice stick - then that same licorice stick duplicated and connected back to the body as arms and legs.
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| Body blocked in - face geometry was a separate piece just like the arms and legs |
Once the basic form was done, I pushed him into ZBrush with GoZ and created all the other geometry and did some polygon painting.
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| Merlin in Zbrush looking very unenthused about his concept sketch? |
For all those who can't get enough of the 360 image slider plugin, here is the obligatory view of Merlin in his t-pose rendered from ZBrush:
Now on to the robe. As I mentioned earlier, I was concerned about the robe, more specifically about the robe deforming properly using Maya's nCloth system. This is because I modeled the robe as a two-sided piece of geometry in ZBrush and wasn't quite sure if the cloth simulation would work. To allay my concerns I did a few tests. The outcome of my last test can be seen below - the nCloth reacts really well to a few extreme poses!
Alright, the animation on my test wasn't great, but it wasn't intended as a show piece - just an nCloth test. In fact, I hokily rigged the model by quickly smooth binding Merlin's body to a stock Maya skeleton. Meh.For those interested, the nCloth setup wound up being fairly straight forward: the robe nCloth was simulated using a very low resolution single-sided polygon shell, then I used that shell to drive a wrap deformer on the higher resolution, two-sided robe. To prevent the robe from running off Merlin's scrawy, licorice frame I used a point-to-surface constraint around the neck verticies.The real rigging process will start in earnest now. Look for a fully rigged and ready for animation Merlin in my next update...