Posing and Learning. New Project!

 To begin off today, I watched alot of videos. ALOT of videos. These are the videos I've watched in trying to learn more about lighting and environmental etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG7ZoP3fd1w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPWKecazgM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8AAX-ENWvQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-31HNc1zD5E&list=PLhORl4_sBR3VBYe4rrWsxIFnNrVtz8Pfe&index=3

Essentially from all of these videos, I've learned how sunlight would interact with the subject versus a point light. Sun light has little to no light fall off, basically no matter how a character is placed on the scene, the light is always the same. Talking about light fall off, it is essentially the 1/distance^2 which denotes how much dimmer the light will become the farther the subject is away. Breaking it down, it is very simple. Smaller light sources will have very sharp and contrasting shadows (same thing with close lights) while large light sources will have softer shadows. The smaller light sources will expose a lot more details on the subject versus a large light which will hide details, this is why people use soft lights, it is to hide the actor's face imperfections. Also Depth of field! Keep it in mind for more realistic ligthting scenarios.

As for toon shading, a tip in creating a more anime like lighting is to use two sun sources. One as the actual sun while the other as a "shadow" color with no shadows set, essentially creating a stylized shadow. The following videos I watched are about dynamic posing.

https://youtu.be/D2gOtDcb8sc?feature=shared

https://youtu.be/t-crXRMju-Y?feature=shared

From what I've gleamed over, is "action lines" basic lines where the body will follow. It helps to visualize the pose so, its pretty neat to keep in mind. On top of this, another important tidbit I learned is weight, center balance. Without a sense of weight, the pose will look wacky.

Moving on from what I watched to learn, I found a video which peaked my interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7NK6kRgKJ4&list=PLhORl4_sBR3VBYe4rrWsxIFnNrVtz8Pfe&index=7

I want to make a similar scene to this one, a dynamic pose, and stark contrasting light. My new project!

The idea is simple, dynamic posing Ladybug in the middle, a wall of text of sorts in the back ground, lights in the front creating contrast with depth of field, slightly blurring out the background.

I began by searching for a good pose for reference. I eventually settled on this.

A strong action line that curves and a strong sense of weight towards the back foot, with the center of balance over the back foot.

So with the ideas in mind, I began.

To start things off, I found a rig for Ladybug, broken naturally, but what made me choose this was because of working shape keys (morphs) for facial expressions. This would make things a little bit easier for me. So I began to fix the rig, much like the others, the bones were in the wrong orientation, however I tried to fix it this time

Helpful Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu5TozPfsD4

In rigging this model, it wasn't without any problems, even with my experience with torture yesterday.

Little note, the wrist isn't exactly working correctly. So I'm going to need to learn how to weight paint properly whenever I make a new rig from scratch.

I did find a little workaround for now, simply twist the forearm bone and hope for the best.

A fun problem which made me lose 30 minutes of time.

Rig is finished, and properly orientated, at least the limbs are. Not bad for only an hour, half of that was just me trying to trouble shoot.

With the rig finished, its time to create the pose, and oh man, for first time posing and trying to make it look dynamic. It was a really REALLY big learning opportunity.

I started out trying to align the feet with the reference, then try to make the pelvis actually face the right way with the right amount of weight on one foot. Long story short, don't do that. Figure out where and how the body weight is shifted FIRST, the feet can come later. That worked the best for me.

Not too bad if I say so myself. 

I wish the model I chose was better, but its a bit too late for that. It has way too many polygons, making it lag if I did a big pose change and the fact that the fingers wasn't rigged correctly bit me in the ass. The hands are UGLY. Another issue would come up because of this model. The eyes.

The eyes, they don't have any bones and worse yet, the eyes are literally eye shaped, so there's no hope in moving the pupil. Fun. So I tried my best in changing the pupils with sculpt mode.

Not too bad, but this did make a large empty gap in the eyeball, so the only option that I can do right now, is to simply put a metaball right behind the thin plane for the eye, filling out the whole eye area.

It... works, just don't look too close at it. Thankfully, I had another idea to help hide it. Using the facial expressions.

Using the shapekeys provided with the model and sculpting the model itself. I managed to make her smirk and close her eyes a bit, to hide the mess of a job in me trying to fix the eye problem. Not bad.

And just like that, a total of 3 hours spent, The pose is finished. I'll tackle the scene tomorrow, but for now. I'm really happy with how I posed Ladybug! Not a boring pose, but a dynamic one for the first one ever! With the way she turned out, honestly, I expected it to go way worse, but everything sort of clicked for me once I understood how the "weight" worked. I did have to physically emulate the pose irl, and honestly it helped a lot in understanding the general balance. 

Another day in blender!

Next time, tackling lighting and scene framing. There are a lot of skills I need to pick up on so far its going great, but man, I'm not looking to learn how to "post process" the renders in Davinci Resolve or Photoshop. 

Until next time!