Miro board link:
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOKHnfj0=/
This week I have been trying to add fur to the cat to experiment. I have found these videos where they use Xgen plug-in in Maya. XGen is an instancing tool most commonly used for creating hair or populating a scene with instanced geometry. There are two primary methods of using it, depending on what you want to do.
This is a screenshot of my first attempt of using xgen, unfortunately when I have applied the xgen collection to the cat geometry it took a very long time to load and when I tried to adjust the lengths, the width and the distribution of the fur it did not affect the original fur at all.
X-gen not working:
Since the first attempt of xgen did not work I tried to remesh to quadrangular mesh from triangular mesh which may have taken off the level of detail of the mesh and fur would have been easier to create.
However, I have attempted to apply fur to the remeshed polygon but the fur would still take too much time to load and I was not able to edit it either.
texturing and rigging the rest of the props
Regarding the fisherman project this week I have added some textures, especially bump map values to some of the props that are part of the scenes. Especially for the boat which will be an important asset for the animation
This is the first attempt of the texture, however the texture was not seamless and appeared to be too stylised.
So I have opted for a much simpler pattern which suited better the boat and the effect I was looking for.
This week I also rigged the fishing rod and studied more which movements it would have to make and rigged the object starting from this reasoning.
For the handle I have just grouped together the main parts of the engine and set the origin at the centre so that when I rotate the handle they would rotate on the same pivot.
As for the main “body” of the fishing rod, I have created some joints which I will after apply some set driven keys to make it brand forward and backward.