Jack designs and development:
Jack was the drunk guy of my story. My main idea it was to create an antagonist to Cuppy, but I didn't wan't it to be really bad (actually in my first idea he was really bad but I changed during the story development).
So, again I decided to research before starting the development of Jack but unfortunately I can't post the pictures of drunk guys I found on the internet and on bars here in Vancouver, but I know if you're looking for drunk guys that it is pretty easy to find it on facebook and on Google (and many times we have some friends that really serve as reference for us).
These were my first Jack sketches:
Later on we were asked to create some facial expressions for reference on blendshapes:
And then the model sheets and some color tests:
From this point in the project the development is almost the same as it is for Cuppy, my glass character, but here I used Jason Osipa's Stop Staring book again as reference and other sources from internet, including stop-motion faces I found in sites like this.
Again I did some research and I was also helped by Justin Tan, our teacher assistant at VFS, Paul Tanner, our modelling teacher and Greg Berridge to model Jack's topology correctly. The first thing I did it was importing Cuppy into the scene so I could have the exactly proportions between the two characters when inserting them into a scene:
After the modeling phase I started to create the UVs and textures for this character, and this included the displacement map for the hair and the beard, that I developed in Mudbox:
The important thing here about these textures it was their size. Some of them had more resolution than others because in my scenes I would need really close shots in Jack's face but I don't have many shots with his pants. So it was useful to overload Maya with high-res textures all around.
For the rigging I decided to use an auto-rig (the animator friendly rig) and made some adaptations to it to fit my character needs (the head control).
The next stage was the preparation of the blendshapes for expressions, and once more I used Jason Osipa's book but with not so many blendshapes because my character wouldn't need blendshapes for all facial expressions, only few that would fit the story needs.
And some Driven Keys to control these blendshapes, and I think this is one of the greatest options Maya has, because you don't need to be a programmer to make these simple things inside it (but you need a good teacher to show you how to make it...).
And then Jack, ready to animate:
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