Week 1

During week 1 I have begun a base model of a realistic wolf. I have also been searching for grooming resources online. There's not as many resources as I would like but I'm confident I can find some. I might ask around with some of my peers to see if they can think of somewhere to look that I have not. Also, I am going for the Houdini method of grooming as opposed to Xgen. After some research looking through CFX job descriptions it seems that most Visual Effects houses prefer using Houdini. In fact, learning more Houdini can never be a bad thing.

In addition to finding tutorials and learning resources, I have begun to gather photographic references of wolves. I am trying to focus on the bust and face of the wolf. I am confident that if I can learn how to do that part very well, then I can do all the rest well too.

Another mission of mine with this project is to learn blend shapes. I am not learning blendshapes from scratch. I do know how to do basic ones already. What I'm interested in is a full ranch of facial expressions. Again, I will use photographic expressions and then sculpt the expressions in zbrush. And then I will export them into maya where I can animate it myself. I will then bring everything into houdini to do the groom sim.

I am hoping that my reesults will look close to nature and that the fur will deform well with the blendshape animations.

We will see.

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WEEK 1 PT.2

I just took approximately 15 mins to do a blendshapes test in zbrush. This is a proof of concept, and I am not using this expression. The model here is not nearly done enough.

Also, I took a couple hours to REALLY dig for good references. I Also arranged them in Pure Ref in a way that makes sense for me. I have specifically artic wolf photos, snarling, teeth, écorchés, nose close ups, and eye close ups.