Rigged Fat Dodo

I have now UV mapped, rigged, and painted the weights on my fat dodo. To be honest I've found it hard to believe how smoothly modelling and rigging my second character have gone after experiencing all the difficulties with UV mapping and importing it into Unity. I guess I learnt alot of things such as the evils of 5 sided polygons the hard way with my first ever character and that experience is paying off now.

Over the next couple of days I'm going to put some keyframe animations together for my characters and import them into Unity.

Modelling a Fat Dodo

Now that I have finished modelling and rigging my flying dodo I have begun modelling my fat-flghtless dodo. Progress so far has been smooth, I have been taking particular care not to create any 5 sided polygons so as to avoid the trouble I had with my flying dodo!

Completed Modelled and Textured Dodo

After all the difficulty of the last two weeks trying to texture my flying Dodo he is finally working properly. Model and texture can be viewed in Unity here (use standard fps controls to walk/ around):
http://chrisgordon.com.au/dodo/ModelledTexturedDodo.html

I'm very happy with the result especially considering this is my first ever animated character.

I've have endeavored to keep the model as low-poly as possible as I plan to add more detailed body feathers next semester which will required more polygons and more detailed normal mapping. The current model has 3382 faces, 3453 vertices, and edges 6735.

After removing all the nGons as discussed in the previous post and repainting all the skin weights the model is now correctly textured and imports into Unity perfectly.

Screen Captures of Textured Model:

Source of UV Mapping Problem

After speaking to my tutor Paul yesterday we were still unsure what was causing the problem with the UV map and texture in Maya but, had found that in blender the UV map worked perfectly. After some discussion we decided it would be better just to import the dodo into Unity and assign the texture there or use a different modelling program to redo the UV map and setup textures.

Fortunately this decision lead to my discovery of what the problem was. Last night after uni I decided to import the Dodo model into Unity and see how it looked and assign the texture that way as discussed in the tutorial. Upon importing the model into Unity I found there were several holes in the model, as can been seen in the screen capture below:

On further investigation in Maya I found I had several 5 sided polygons as you can see in the image below. I vaguely remember someone telling me 5 sided polygons are bad but, not why.

I fixed these two 5 sided polygons by remove the polygon altogether and recreating them as one four sided and one 3 sided polygon which, although not the neatest solution does solve the problem. The end result is as follows:

This still didn't fix the UV texturing problem but I decided to see if there was a way I could find other 5 sided polygons quickly. Thats when I found this great forum post which explains bad geometry, how to find it and how to fix it:

http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?157746-Tutorial-Bad-Geometry-–-How-to-find-and-fix-it

After running a mesh cleanup to select 5 sided polygons as suggested in the forum post I found two more 5 side polygons (or nGons as I now know they are called) on the the legs of my Dodo. Now I have corrected all these nGons my the UV map now works but, I have to repaint all my skin weights again as I had to unbind the geometry to fix the nGons.

I'm glad I have finally fixed the UV mapping problem as this has been frustrating me for the best part of two weeks! The lesson learned here is that although other 3D programs don't seem to mind then 5 sided polygons are very bad, especial when importing the model into a game engine as these typically triangulate all models! Now I look back this reinforces my opinion that in future I should model the head in the same Maya file as the body as one piece instead of creating it as two pieces and joining. This would have avoided the miss matched number of vertices on the body and the head when I was joining the two which ultimately ended up in me unwittingly created two 5 sided polygons.

In the future I definitely be much more careful to avoid creating 5 sided polygons!

This Week Rigging and Island Creation

Over the last week I have focused on rigging, and texturing my flying Dodo. I have completed the rig and am quite happy with the amount articulation it provides for animating the Dodo. The only two things I have left that I would like to rig are the dodo's eyelids and nostrils. Unfortunately I'm not quite sure how to approach this so am going to do some research and come back to this later.

Overall I'm quite happy with how the rigging process wen't considering I have never rigged and animated anything before. At first I laid out the bones of the character and then smooth bound them to the geometry. I didn't realise though that I then had to 'paint weights' for each bone to dictate which areas of the geometry a bone would effect. Fortunately after a bit of googling I found the following tutorial which was very helpful in guiding me through this process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMuo8SsIaQA&feature=channel

Once this tutorial had got me started I found the rigging process to be quite straight forward.

As you can see from the pictures below he still hasn't been textured quite yet. I've hit a brick wall on this one and I'm still not sure why I can't UV map the model correctly.

Rigged Dodo:

The Island

This week I also began work on the an island in Unity which will be the set of my entire animatic. This was quite straight forward using Unity's terrain building tools. I also added a volcano for extra effects and to give me a change to play with particle effects in Unity. Setting up this simple volcano particle effect was much easier than I had anticipated.

Maya/Mac Troubles

This week I have been having quite a lot of trouble progressing with my animatic as Maya is running particularly slowly on my MacBook Pro. I have tried reinstalling Maya, deleting all the preference files and numerous other suggestions in from internet forums to no avail. Even creating a simple cube and trying to move it around results in the beach-ball-of-death for 5-10second each time I move it a little way. Weirdly all other programs on my Mac are functioning just fine.

At this stage I have given up using Maya on my Mac and am now using my PC which is working smoothly.

I have also had several attempts at UV mapping texturing my Dodo by using automatic mapping and them exporting snapshot to a PSD for me to texture and them apply as a material to the Dodo.

All of these steps go okay, UV map is created, snapshot looks okay, and material is assigned but, no matter what I do the texture doesn't appear on the model in high quality render, viewport... anywhere.

A screen shot showing the UV map applied texture and the viewport can be seen below. As you can see the texture and a UV map line up correctly in the UV texture editor but, in the viewport with textures visible the texture does not line up at all. I have spent several frustrating nights on this now. Unfortunate as it's the mid semester break I can't ask the teach staff advice until next Friday. As I have wasted so much time trying to work this out already I will have to move onto other tasks in the meantime.

To prove to myself I wasn't crazy I also modelled a box quickly and applied a UV map and texture in the same way within the same Maya file. As you can see below this worked perfectly which has frustrated me more.

Flying Dodo Progress

Over the last week I have continued to focus on modelling my primary character. The dodo I have modelled includes wings as the opening scenes will show the dodo before it discovered the island of mauritius. To make my final dodo I will be reusing this dodo scaling it and modifying it into the plump flightless dodo we know today.

Overall I am quite happy with the flying dodo so far although I did experience a fair amount of difficulty import the dodo's head into the same Maya file as the body and attaching it to the body. The first few times I imported the head Maya file all that got imported was a messy pile of polygons that in no way represented the head. Eventually I exported the head as an FBX file and imported it which worked well.

I then had some difficulty attaching the head to the body as I hadn't correctly matched the number of vertex on the body's neck with the base of the head so I have two extra vertexes on the bodies side. In the end I think it would have been easier to just model the head as part of modelling the body rather than creating it in a completely separate Maya file.

Next I am going to UV map and texture the flying Dodo. As I have had no experience UV mapping or texturing before I am slightly worried about this step.

Low-Poly:

High-Poly: