PreSemester Progress

I've been alternating between modeling and texturing, I've had some progress and some setbacks with each.

Texturing:

The texturing is coming pretty well as a basic start, below is a quick render of the planet as it currently looks.



At the moment the image gets pretty pixelated when the camera moves in for close-ups so I'm going to have to scan the image at higher resolution. There is obvious faceting which doesn't seem to be solved by smoothing. The problem is solved by softening normals, however, because they are separate pieces, if I soften the edge normals the image fades to black along the edge and the individual pieces are obvious--this can be seen below.



I may have to do a visibility switch where I use a sphere for the end when the camera pulls out. The faceting shouldn't be an issue for the small pieces the smaller Justin manipulates, so a visibility switch won't be necessary.

Modeling:

As far as modeling Justin goes, I've been tweaking the face, smoothing out the cheeks and softening the chin. I also imported the ears I created for my original model of Justin and replaced Norman's ears. I created a hat/hair piece and am in the midst of extruding faces to make his hair stick out. He's looking more and more like a human and like Justin, which is encouraging.

I'm having some trouble with the body--unlike the head which is skinned to only one joint, the body is skinned between joints and it seems that adding a blend shape doesn't deform the geometry fully.--Just solved the problem...Because I smoothed the geo after it was skinned, there was unnecessary history active, so I deleted the nondeformer history, recreated the blend shape at front of chain and it works!

The one issue I'm still having is with the eyes. The twist controls on the eyes are on the parent eye joint, which i never moved, so the eye is rotating around an external pivot. This seems to be the issue with the lid twist controls as well. Still trying to figure out what to do about this...

Here's a screenshot of the model at the moment:



Also, it seems that I've discovered the reason the mouth flapped open and closed when rotating the head last semester--scaling the head control does it. I noticed that the head is very flat from front to back, as is obvious in the side view below.



I attempted to scale the head to fix the problem but I guess since scaling the head control scales the other controls, somehow distortion occurs and the geometry gets deformed bizarrely.

An easy solution to my problem is to duplicate the geometry while the head is scaled to the shape I like and use this new stretched geometry as blend shapes.