In August, I was still in reminiscing Avatar show having rewatching many episodes that I have rewatched several time already, I set out a goal to create another model/rig inspired from the show, this time it was the Penguin from the first episode of the first season.
I started with reference and blocked out in Zbrush.
Instead of sculpting everything in Zbrush first. I went straight into retopo in Maya. The goal was to revisiting old school box modeling aside from learning how to create good edge loop.
I created a very basic diffuse map in photoShop. There was definitely ugliness in here as texture and Uv stitching was something I’m still struggling with but for this purpose, it was fine. Next, with the goal of learning different auto riggers, this is because rigging myself manually would require a lot of time as I do not know how to create scripts for automation yet. On top of that, I was researching different auto rigger tool for my day job, I chose Advance Skeleton tool to rig the character up. The tool came with animation sets for testing deformation, I applied one of the walk animations and tweaked here and there to complete the animation test below.
I also rigged the face with Advance Skeleton but the result was not desirable as my edge loops setup were not so great. I was planning to release the rig for free but respecting the rule of Advance Skeleton, I could not release the rig if I don’t own the license for the tool. A $2000 license was a bit too steep of a price for me to acquire and so the thought of releasing this rig was put away. I learned a lot from the experiment. I am planning to revisit the project at another time but for now, it was time for me to move on.