Major Project: Beggar turnaround

                    

Major Project: Aftereffects Rig test

Even though the beggar will be animated in maya, I have decided to do a quick test of rigging in Aftereffects before making the 2d characters (waterman, musician, dancer, storyteller and fortune-teller) to have an idea of the process and how to achieve the painterly style.
After animating the 2d characters, they will be imported into photoshop to paint frame by frame.
Below is a quick rig test, I am happy about how much I can do with the rig and also the characters won't have extreme poses, so it should be fine.

Major Project: Beggar Retexturing

I decided to retexture the beggar in order to push his style a bit more as I wasn't happy with the previous texturing. Below are some colour variations and combinations, using neutral colours seemed to be the right choice to keep things "minimalistic" and let the other elements stand out such as the lines and overall design.

3, 5 & 6 seem to stand out for me, in terms of variety of colours and unity. However 3 might be a bit too dull. Any feedback is welcome.

Major project: Beggar Scarf Ncloth

Concerning the scarf, I have decided to make it dynamic for a more realistic look. So after making the scarf from a duplicate of the torso, I have weighted parts of the scarf that don't need to be dynamic to the torso and painted the dynamic parts. However I have realised that the additional planes of the scarf don't follow the dynamic cloth, so Alan suggested applying a cluster to the additional planes with vertices from the scarf, which was successful.

Major Project: Beggar Prop

After gathering a few reference images for the cane's design, I have done a few design developments for the beggar's prop bearing in mind the expressionistic style. I have tried not to exaggerate the design too much to keep it consistent with the beggar's design.

When taking it into maya, I have mixed parts of the designs that stood out more and used the 1point cv curve in order to get sharp edge rather than round ones and then extruded a plane along the along and played around with the offset to get the right thickness.
I am also thinking of having the additional planes to the cane in order to achieve the straight lines in the 2d drawings.

Major project: Beggar progress

I have been thinking about using toonshader in order to translate the 2d look into 3d, there seems to be a few problems when animating the 3d character, so I decided to use planes around the character and use transparency when texturing them.
I started by extruding the edge from a duplicate of the original mesh, then separating it and point snapping to the exact point from where it was extracted. This allowed me to copy the exact skin values to the plane from the original mesh vertex in order to have a similar movement to the original geometry.

 

Major Project: Beggar Rigging Complete

      

Major Project: Beggar Skinning Complete

      

Major Project: Beggar 2D walk-cycle

Minor Project: Beggar Head Modelling

Minor Project: Modelling The beggar

Blocking the head shape.
It's been a bit slow as I had to make a few decisions while blocking his initial shape.

Minor Project: Orthographic

Here is the orthographic view for the beggar, I might need to revisit it and tweak the face.
Concerning the amount of details, the texturing process will involve the lines from the original sketch therefore I am avoiding including too much detail at this stage. However I will be making changes as I am modelling him. 

Minor project: Concept Art

This won't be the final concept, but rather an experiment to see how the painterly style works and how the head fits with the body.