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Charlie Bear Brown 10

Nearly 20 days of work, on and off on this character. Granted I learned some new tricks and techniques. I was working from yet another book which had different lessons. For the most part I was picking and choosing the parts of the book that would help me model a character.

After playing around with the lighting a bit I moved on to rendering. Below are some views of Charlie in a pose. I will render some animations and post them on the Reel section of this site. Check there to see Charlie move.

I'm thrilled with the way my teddy bear turned out. Now he will always be with me, HA. The fur texture didn't come off so bad, I feared that it would look like a bunch of patches waving in different directions.

In the future I may re-do Charlie as a high-resolution model. However, for animation purposes he is ready to sign a contract.

Labels: 3d, CharlieBear

Charlie Bear Brown 09

So much to learn. For Charlie Bear Brown I used the Skin modifier as opposed to the Physique modifier I used on my first game character. There are some major differences in how you manipulate the influence of the bones on the mesh with Skin.

Below you can see that each bone has envelopes that can be re-sized to affect the mesh around it. Using Skin was very handy. Although, it took me a lot of trial and error to figure out how it works. Here again you can save custom files called ".env". These files allowed me to tweak and save my progress. I kept multiple copies as I refined my envelopes.

Afterwards I spent some time moving the bones around and watching Charlie's mesh deform. I eventually went back to the bones and saved progressive changes as ".fig" files until I was happy with the figure. Then re-applied the Skin modifier and loaded my latest .env file.

Such happiness when things work out.

Using Skin (opposed to Physique) kicked ass and I learned about 2 new file types in Max to help me save time and my sanity.

Labels: 3d, CharlieBear

Charlie Bear Brown 08

This past weekend I rigged Charlie with a custom Biped skeleton. Don't you love his big phat head? I do.

Placing the bones was a snap and using a transparent mesh allows me to see what i'm doing when modify the bones. Also, as a shortcut I only setup the green bones and copy the attributes over to the blue bones.

Labels: 3d, CharlieBear

Charlie Bear Brown 07

I'm feeling very sleepy at the moment, but I was too excited to see what Charlie would look like with his fur on. I rendered him from the front view, you can see the wire-frame composite below.

All that hard work unwrapping, taking photos of the bear, and stitching the textures finally paid off. Say hello to Charlie Bear Brown.

I couldn't figure out why his poly count was so high. Then it hit me! I made Charlie's eyes out of multiple spheres, mostly because I wanted model his real plastic eyes. I should consider making them a texture and loosing almost 1k in vertices and geometry.

Labels: 3d, CharlieBear

Charlie Bear Brown 06

The layouts are being done in two maps. I tried using just one, but the fur didn't look right. So I split the head and the body into two UV layouts, which I have saved as individual ".uvw" files. Giggity!

It took a while to stitch Charlie in Photoshop. He wasn't as easy as a pair of pants. First I took many photos of my teddy bear in decent lighting. Then I had to color match them. After that I started cutting, pasting, and painting.

It was kind of weird to virtually dissect my bear and flatten out his skin. All in the name of art and animation.

Labels: 3d, CharlieBear

Charlie Bear Brown 05

Unwrapping is for the boids! Really man, couldn't there be an easier way? Someone please help me here. I gotta find that one tool that unwraps a mesh for you with one click based on the seams you draw. Does that exist?

After spending some late nights and the weekend, this guy is finally unwrapped in a decent manner. I started over with the UVW modifier so many times, then I read about saving layouts. WOW.

Saving UV layout files helped me so much. I was able to texture bits and pieces at a time, save a UV file, then later I would load it, collapse the stack and do it over again. I know I sound crazy to most of you, but take my word; unwrapping is madness best taken with a shot of Patron.

Here you can see Charlie with his checker pattern on. Some stretching is occurring around his neck and on the top of his head; F@CK it!

Labels: 3d, CharlieBear

Charlie Bear Brown 04

After I finished modeling Charlie as a complete character, I went back and re-worked some of the features on his head.

The legs also needed more evenly spread faces. I'm quite happy with the way he is now, but only after animation will I really know what needs work. I can already tell that the arms and leg may be a pain.

I've colored his mesh purely for my own benefit and to represent his actual color scheme. Here you can see him in low poly and with no smoothing. The head may not be fully low poly, but this project is for fun and I want some clean smoothing in his face later on.

Labels: 3d, CharlieBear

Charlie Bear Brown 03

That was a long fun weekend. Now back to the modeling...

Unlike my first game character, Charlie will be a single mesh object. I finished his body last night. Well, for the most part. I left a couple of holes on his torso where I plan to put the arms.

Even though I'm trying to keep this model low-poly, I do want his arms and legs to bend nicely. I may have to come back and add geometry after I put a rig on him.

As I was modeling I kept noticing that I drew Charlie a bit wide. I attempted to draw him to his proportions, but for animation it may not work. You'll notice below that he is going to be a bit thinner than the drawing.

Labels: 3d, CharlieBear

Charlie Bear Brown 02

The head is going well, even though I've started over a handful of times. I tried the spline modeling technique that I used on Van Der Dick and It just didn't seem to be working out for me.

I am at a good point after a couple of days worth of modeling though. The proportions of the snout and ears needed major work. It is quite nice having a real object to draw inspiration from. Especially since my artwork is not museum worthy, yet!

Here are a couple of views of the head, plus a screen capture from the reference drawing.

Labels: 3d, CharlieBear

Charlie Bear Brown 01

I have a teddy bear that was given to me when I was 8 years old. His name is Charlie Bear Brown. I'm not sure how I came up with that, but I'm sure that my mother helped me. I do like Snoopy quite a bit and it's possible that there was an influence from the Peanuts.

Moving on...

Every once in a while I would sketch this bear and it only seemed fitting to model him in 3d. It is the least I can do for a stuffed animal that has given me so many fond childhood memories. It's not always easy being a latchkey child you know.

Here we go...

Labels: 3d, CharlieBear

ProjectBlog

October 20, 2008

Charlie Bear Brown 10

October 16, 2008

Charlie Bear Brown 09

October 13, 2008

Charlie Bear Brown 08

October 11, 2008

Charlie Bear Brown 07

October 10, 2008

Charlie Bear Brown 06

October 6, 2008

Charlie Bear Brown 05

October 3, 2008

Charlie Bear Brown 04

September 30, 2008

Charlie Bear Brown 03

September 26, 2008

Charlie Bear Brown 02

September 24, 2008

Charlie Bear Brown 01