Open Sourcing

ince I finished my Bone character recently I decided to design and rig a completely original character. This is the design sketch that came out of my thinking. It's certainly not a finished sketch by any means, but the character I had in mind didn't really require any reference pictures to create in blender, so I figured it was good enough. I knew that I wanted a robotic character that was some what human shaped. He looks somewhat goofy and gangly which is probably why my girlfriend recommended the name Marty.

Marty is somewhat easy to model, being all mainly spheres and cylinders. On the left is the first render of him. The next step is the hands, which should be pretty quick as well. Obviously the material needs some tweaking, but it's certainly better than the default gray! I'm not sure whether or not the cylinders should be different materials from the spheres, but that's something that I'll look at later. I'm anxious to start rigging him as I haven't done any mechanical rigging before. The cylinders going into the spheres for his joints poses an interesting problem for rigging actually. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do it yet. I do know that I want a full range of motion with all his joints. This should hopefully lead to some pretty funny animations in the future!

did a little work with my Bone character this past weekend and made a nice little walk cycle for him. There are a couple of things that I would change if I was making this for an animation or a final project, but I think it's pretty good for a first ever walk cycle attempt. Take a look and let me know what you think:


Blender Bone Walkcycle from Tim Brown on Vimeo

In a lot of walk cycles that I've seen your eyes are drawn to the feet and legs because there is nothing else going on with the rest of the body. This makes someone instantly focus on what could be better with the legs and feet. Not wanting to show anybody how poorly my character's legs are actually rigged, I figured I'd draw people's attention to his head and face by adding some head movement, eye blinks, and slight eye brow movement. See, you probably didn't even notice that his legs deform when taking a step!

I'm not real sure what I'm planning on using this little guy for, but it was fun making him. I'm going to call him done for a little while, until I think of something to do with him. I have a couple more projects out there in various states of completeness, so I'll see if I can work on getting one of those completed for now!