I have made a new character to be a kind of friend of Igor. It’s a robot, which so far has no name (any suggestions?) and will star with Igor in future animations. It’s a challenge to come up with a unique robot, there are thousands of robots out there in Google Images and beyond.

It’s not completely finished, I may add some things. The display panel on his chest has a retro look to it, and I’m sure the display will change to something modern. I haven’t yet decided to think of a design for the display, I just quickly put what you see in the pictures as a display. The main idea for the display was for it to somehow show visually when the character speaks, since the character has no mouth.

I might also tweak the boots a bit, and could add some detail to the body, like tubes or lights or something you might see on futuristic things. I’m not sure about that yet, I don’t have any specific ideas, except to maybe have some sort of backpack. The backpack could have some sort of interesting panel on it, with lights etc, and could be used to carry things that are needed in the story.

The character is fully rigged, and has a walk cycle. The arms and legs are rigged and can move to any position that human arms and legs can move. The fingers can also move the same as human fingers. The eyes can also be animated, including the top and bottom eye lids. The eye lids can be positioned in several ways to create different facial expressions. I’ll experiment with this during the week and post whatever expressions I come up with. I have already come up with a few.

Here are some stills. Click on each image to view the larger size:

Here is a small clip showing some eye movement: ( Tiny filesize: 236kb )

Here is a small clip showing the walk cycle:

This week I intend to study Fume FX, a 3ds Max plugin which does fire, smoke and explosions. There are some excellent tutorial DVDs out there presented by people who have used Fume FX in huge special effects films, such as 2010, Iron Man, and Armageddon. Fume FX is also used a huge amount in the very popular video game, Dante’s Inferno. I’ll watch some free tutorials for a while to get used to it, then buy the DVDs.

I’ve also recently watched a few DVDs my wife bought me for my birthday. I watched a 2 DVD set of tutorials that teach 3ds Max from the ground up, which went for over 20 hours. It was excellent, I highly recommend it to anyone starting out with 3ds Max. I had spent a lot of hours in 3ds Max before watching these tutorials, and wondered if the beginner part of the tutorials might only teach things that I knew already. I learned a huge amount though about even the basic things, there were many tips and tricks that I never knew about some of the tools that I had used hundreds of times. These were little known tricks for these tools that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Just when you think a tool was just used for a couple of different things, in a straight forward way, you learn it can do so much more. Just like I thought nail clippers were just for cutting fingernails and toenails. I was amazed to learn they could be used as a lethal force which could enable someone to hijack a plane, and hold a plane load of people hostage. Now I am not allowed to take them on a plane. I got the tutorials from here: http://eat3d.com/3dsmax101

I also have the eat3d texturing DVD. There is a sample clip to show what it teaches: http://eat3d.com/texturing

I also have the fountain series too! See the sample video for details: http://eat3d.com/fountain_highres

Obviously watching all of these videos takes away from actually doing things in 3ds Max, but in the end it it is much quicker to get the education first before modeling or doing whatever. Things go much faster when you know what you are doing.

There is so much to learn though. Through this year I want to get good at all of these things:

Creating models – I’ve done a lot of this.

Texturing models – Texture is the bumps and sometimes scratches on an object’s surface that make it look real. I haven’t done much of this, but I have a lot of tutorials.

Creating Materials – This goes with texture. Materials are often photos, so you could have a photo of wood, and display it on an object. This photo is smooth, and when used by itself it looks unrealistic. However if a wood texture was made from this photo (not hard), then the wood would appear to have a proper wood texture (perhaps appear rough with open grain because of the way the light creates shadows from the raised and lowered bits of wood on the surface). The roughness comes from a texture map, but the colour comes from the material (photo).

Lighting – A vast subject in itself. I really only understand the basics. I do have a lengthy video tutorial series on this though (for when I have time!)

Rigging characters and models – The ability to control the parts of objects using self-made controllers. I’m just getting into this, though I had small experience rigging Igor’s arms and fingers.

Animation – Hmm making things move. I have some experience with this.

Special Effects – Fire, explosions, sparks, energy balls etc. I have no experience with this in 3ds Max (some in After Effects), but am looking forward to learning it.

Particle systems – These are things made from small particles, such as rain, snow, blizzards, flying insects, grass, dust storms, wind. This is a huge subject, and not so easy to learn.

Normally in film companies, people work in one of these areas. I want to be good at it all though.