Karen: Karl dude, once you have any rendered pics, send them to me over email so that i can put them into the presentation. Most of the slide will just be of concept art and rendered pics, but hopefully that will do. Also, can you send ALL the props you have made so far so that i can place them into the treehouse. Ryan has given me the file to work with, so i just want to try and place them all in the treehouse and render it to actually get a real feel of how everything looks all together. I have made some props for the garden, but they are only basic poop ones as they don't need to be the greatest for one shot.
Our and Karl i have an idea for us animating which i shall talk to you about on Monday.

Laura i hope our model hasn't been too much of an arse to rig and i can not wait to start playing around with him once you are done. Your a star!!! Summer is ready to start being rigged whenever you are ready, just let me know.

James we have an updated version of the treehouse for you to try and experiment with lightning. If your in on monday then we can give it to you then.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend guys,
See you all monday!

Laura: Send me Summer today. Have you or Ryan fixed the Panda's eyelids? that's the only thing, really. Once they're done, I can do the blendshapes, and finalise the weights. :D

Ryan: sorry laura i got a bit confused from the last message we sent to each other, i thought you still had a couple bits to do on it before giving it back to us to sort out, i'll get it fixed asap and have it back to you very soon. Will you be able to copy all the rig you've done so far onto the updated model?

Karen: Summer has been uploaded onto adrive, so whenever you are ready, she is there waiting for you =).

Laura: The rig is super easy to paste onto another model. :D I was just waiting for you to fix the eyelids before I finished off the other bits, otherwise, I'd need to do every single one again as the model would be different.

Ryan: k cool, now i understand, me a doo doo brain!! i'll get on it asap, but until then you can play around with summer for a bit if you have any time.

Laura: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LPSO801P
Play with it, and tell me if you can break it. :D
Only thing left for me to do is set up blendshapes annddd a manip for the fingers. ^^

Ryan: hey there, i just downloaded the rig but the skeleton isn't attached to the body, i don't know how to attach them together ?!?! :S

Laura:I thought, once I'd uploaded it, that I'd forgotten to skin it~ I'll do that in the morning before I go to work. xD But, does the rig move okay without being skinned? :3

Ryan:yeah the rig seemed to move about alright =)

Laura:Ah, awesome. ♥ I'll pop up a mostly weight painted version tomorrow night. Work all weekend means no time to do uni work. ><

With any luck, the way I've been sorting my skinning recently, it won't need an awful lot of painting, so should be relatively fast to set up. ^^ Blendshapes will take a wee while though. Does it talk, or just make faces?

Ryan:it makes faces and does a scary growl in one of the shots, heres a link to the face expressions of the character

hey laura, just a quick question for you. In terms of the modelling process before rigging, does all the geometry have to be attached or can i just go to mesh->combine?? I was wondering because the other character we have has the head seperate from the body at the moment and it's going to be a pain to join the geometry of the head and body together, so i just wanted to know if by using 'combine' will it still allow the rigging to work properly?? hope this makes sense, i'm not good at explaining stuff lol

Laura: Um, I suppose it'll be more of a problem for painting weights? I'm basically gonna do exactly the same rig, but with more fingers for Summer. So, you don't have to worry about having her head attached until it's done? I can build the rig around the model without the head attached, and it'll work out alright, but skinning it without it being attached will probably look a tad weird, as her neck mesh bits might trip out when the spine moves. I can't really tell until it happens though. Could give it a go?

Ryan:hmmm, it'll prob be best if i just attach it then, i was kinda hoping to cut out some work for myself but it doesnt seem worth the risk in the long run, thanks

Laura:It has just occurred to me that the panda doesn't have eyelids.. So it's gonna take a little working out to get it to blink..

Ryan:yeah me and karen realised that the other day, we figured we'd just model them in and give the rig back to you if thats cool?

Laura:D'you want me to finish this one up, or wait til you've done the eyelids on it? 'Cause I'll have to repaint the weights around the face, and re-do the blendshapes if I start those. :)

Ryan:hhm just finish everything except for doing the face and blendshapes, then we'll add the eyelids and give it back to you so you can properly work on the face without having to redo what you've already done, yay or nay?

Laura: Sounds gooood. ^^ I'll skin it now, and pop it on here for you. I'll paint weights for it all. I'm fairly sure I'll be able to transfer them across to another model. ^^

Rigging

Laura: Hi all~ The rig for Pandy is coming along swiftly. I've nearly finished his arms/hands at the moment, and this is just with a few hours each day.
There's a couple of pics of the rig from yesterday in my blog. I've only got his hands, spine and then eyes to do with bones left. From there, its blendshapes for facial expressions. ^^

Karen:it sounds like you are doing a great job, thank you sooooooo much =)

Mirror mirror on the wall

Karen: James!!!!!!!!! I was wondering if you may know how to create a mirror effect in maya at all? Because summer is going to have a comb and mirror on her draws and want to see if we can actually get reflection from the mirror.

James:r reflections arnt that hard you just have to turn up the reflectivity and if you turn everything else down then you get just reflections :D you have to make shore there is something to reflect tho cos reflecting the black nothing ness of maya dsnt look very good :D

PigTails

Karl: wow looking great karen

Karen: ‎=) Hehe thanks

Laura: Looking super nice, yeah. :D