Here’s the third part of the Velocirator series, where you get to follow an enemy all the way from first concept to a finished and animated 3d mesh.
Once again I have in co-operation with Håkan compiled this little video, it shows my workflow as I rig, skin and textur the Velocirator (Ratociraptor?) in 3ds max, at 12 times the original speed.

I will make sure to keep my camera rolling when I animate it as well, look forward to it! Please!

Next week, starting on Tuesday, we’ll be posting a series of posts that are connected to eachother and showing how we work . We will do this using one of our enemies. First of is Nixi, our concept artist, that first shows how he draws two versions of the enemy. In the Next post Jona, one of our 3d artists show how he makes a 3d model using Nixis concept art. In the third video Jona is skinning and texturing the 3d model. In the last video you’ll see the enemy move.

Here’s a little “pre taste” video of Llaknel being textured in Mudbox.

Last night I had some trouble sleeping so I decided to start work on some 3d instead. Its been a while since I worked with 3d modeling so I was happy to feel how fast I adapted to the workflow. It took about three hours to complete the base model and it ended up using only about 1,7k triangles. That is very low but the result looked pretty good considering.

Forest enemy 3dmodel

I continued to work on the rig during the day, first skinning the low poly and then adding a turbosmooth modifier which automatically subdivides the mesh and makes it smoother. The skin adapted very well to the new mesh and I could begin animating, but a model needs textures and textures needs a good unwrapping, which should be done before you start with the rig. Luckily I figured out a way to solve this problem by simply saving the skin and adding it later to the unwrapped model. Its still wip and stuff like weapons, clothes or armor will be added later.

I learned a lot of things making this model and Jona showed me a couple of things I’ve never used before, mostly biped animation tips and tricks. Thank you.

Back to work on Llaknel again, the scales have been set and today I’ve rigged and skinned him.
The rig is an ordinary Biped and using fewer bones than I would have prefered I’ve gotten the skinning to work, seems the model was a success.

When the skinning is 100% done I’ll start ranting about animations.

Yesterday I’ve finally fixed the last parts of Llaknel’s face mesh and after that was finished I had enough time to re-model his weaponry.

Today I might have finally finished the Llaknel mesh just gotta send it in for a final revision, I’ve made the arms into separate elements from the rest of the mesh, this should help in preventing weird artifacts during animation it should also make skinning the character much faster.