Chibi

Description:

Chibi

by Quandtum

License: CC BY-SA

Blender version: SVN r42475

My daughter calls this one Eiffel.

Another old model of mine (only about 1 year ago I think). This one had a number of purposes:

1.) I intended to use different loop flows in some of the joints, which got reworked several times. My goal was to gain a deeper understanding of the mesh deformations, make a squishy model yet still have underlying bone and muscle volume.

2.) I wanted to start to understand how all the pros can hand paint epic textures. This was my sad first attempt at creating textures from nothing.

3.) Shape keys and facial deformations. There were some (I see not in this file) but ultimately this chibi face was too much of a challenge to do much with.

4.) This later then was going to be part of a larger animation project.

a.) Preview: http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/5966/wideset.png

b.) Soundtrack: http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/252224

c.) Box Thing : http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=119632&d=1289068658 Note: Box Thing was (and will be again) released, but had CGTextures and needs to be retextured.

5.) Rig experimentation. I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of intuitive rigging. Most of this is from reverse engineering the skinny squirrel from BB.

I spent about an entire month ripping through this and trying a multitude of different things. I seriously wanted to know of all the different decisions I could make, what would their consequences be... unfortunately there are way too many possibilities for that, but I learned a lot.

The ears are not manifold, this was intentional. On layer 3 are some "kitty ears". 1.) I wasn't sure what I really wanted for ears and 2.) Having them interchangeable was a nice idea at the time.

I know there's lots that could be fixed, but rather than pick up where I left off a year ago, I would rather start something new. I need to knock the rust off my skills and would like to see what it takes me to get from the ground up.

A word about the original animation intent (for those that are curious). Eiffel lived on this floating rock, and she existed there happily with her ball. One day these floating, tentacled box things come and steal her ball (for packaging perhaps, I don't really know why). In the first half of the musical score is her panic and stalled response. The music changes about half way through, where she would rise up "heroically" to save her ball, swinging on tentacles and bouncing on boxes, only to land back on her island with her ball. Sound track is 44 seconds, and production was expected to be less than a month.

Why not finish it you ask? Animation is not my thing, that seems to be the threshold where I am not "patient" enough. I do enjoy modelling, texturing and rigging (usually rigging =P).

Why share? Why not? Better than wasting away on a hard drive.

Anyways, bored you all enough, enjoy!

P.S. The up/down arrows control the IK/FK switch for the left/right hands/feet. Hehe, reset the pose and wiggle the hips from the front and side views... it makes my daughter laugh =P