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.