Die Fly!

[Darkwing]

So after being deeply annoyed by some houseflies, I came up with this idea for a short animated piece about a dude trying to kill this one housefly. So I'm going ahead with it as a minor side project. So here are the two characters, my PC connected to the scanner is currently indisposed so I use my laptop webcam to take an picture of the drawings, so I'm sorry for the low res, the high res ones will be posted later

 

[HomeSlice]

That looks good so far!

[Darkwing]

Thanks, I've already started building Fly and the joy of it is in its simplicity

[Darkwing]

here we go

 

[Darkwing]

And some more, I forgot to close off the holes on the lathed objects, so I should do that before continuing with my rigging

 

[TheSpleen]

would you like my fly model from the plagues video?

Yours looks great! just offering.

 

Gene

[Darkwing]

actually yes, it can be my stand-ins! and here's a pic of my newly posed model

 

[TheSpleen]

fly.mdl

[pixelplucker]

Nice lookin fly.

[DarkLimit]

Nice fly I like him, is that toonrender?

[Darkwing]

that it is. I'm still tossing between doing it toon render or doing it standard render

[Darkwing]

So, I'm having some problems building the dude character. I thought it was gonna be easier building a cartoon character, guess I was wrong. This is what I ended up with which is nothing like the picture:

 

[HomeSlice]

That looks like a pretty decent start to me. Most cartoon dudes seem to have funny noses. Either really big ones, or they are round, like squashed ping pong balls. You can also add to the cartoony look by making the eyes larger than normal. It may help if you give him a more prominent chin. And his head should start curving inward just below his ear. It looks like you have the skull extending much farther down.

[Darkwing]

yeah, what I think I'm basically gonna do is model it like I would a realistic face, except make it much simpler so that it fits the sketch of him. I tried a different method and it just caused the whole shape of his head to be too wonky, even for a cartoon

[Darkwing]

And this is V.2 and I'm still not happy with it so guess I have to build V.3 grrr.

 

[Darkwing]

well, this is about as good as it gets methinks

 

[Darkwing]

Here's the dude, however, I am having one interesting problem. He loads and renders fine in the modeling view, but, when I go to add him to a chor, if I'm in Shaded or Wire/Shaded mode, the program crashes. If I go to render him from the chor, the program crashes. I have been able to reproduce this consistently. But like I said, Modeling view is fine.

 

[DarkLimit]

Yeah had the same problem when I was working on the illustrations for my kids book, real annoying. Dunno if it's a video card issue or bug.

 

nice model, did you model the hands?

[Darkwing]

No, I grabbed the hands from the Basic Man V2 model, saved a fair amount of time as I was getting no where with my hands

[DarkLimit]

Ah ok, I have been racking my brain for weeks as to how to go about modeling hands. one of the toughest things for me..

[Darkwing]

Well, I have most of the rig done. Fortunately I don't have to be overly fussy as the toon render seems to remove a lot of the blemishes that would otherwise be apparent. Unfortunately the mirrorbones didn't quite work properly and so I have to manually assign CPs to the majority of the left side

[Darkwing]

Ok, so now it won't even load in an action. Can other people use the model? If so, could you save it as a new model and upload it and see if that helps me at all:

 

Joe.mdl

[Darkwing]

guess I'm gonna have to re-rig as that seems to be where the problem is originating

[mtpeak2]

Loads fine here.

[Darkwing]

hm. interesting. And you were able to load it into an action and/or a chor?

[mtpeak2]

yup

[Darkwing]

well, this makes me go back to suspecting it's just the instability of AM on my laptop. I wonder if I upgraded to OSX 6.0 or higher if that would help. Currently I'm at OSX 10.5.8 which has some issues with it in general regarding compatibility of software

[pixelplucker]

You may want to check your textures first, there might be the chance a texture is corrupt causing the crash and not the model. When we open it we have to ignore the missing textures since you didn't include them.

 

Try consolidating it and post a zip and we can see if that is the issue.

[Darkwing]

the only textures are the ones for the eyes which are the uber eyes on the 2006 AM extras CD and they've always worked for me before

[NancyGormezano]

Try not using porcelaine material - I believe macs had a problem with that at one time? Model loads for me as well (PC)

[Darkwing]

nope, doesn't help. See, it would load in an action and Chor before I installed the rig. I must have just messed it up somewhere in the rig installation