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Building 360 dog's head with a long snout: my experience + tips

Posted By candlelight2007 6 Years Ago
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Building 360 dog's head with a long snout: my experience + tips

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candlelight2007
candlelight2007
Posted 6 Years Ago
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When I first saw a new G360 head feature in a demo I got super excited as I had a couple of dog characters that I would have loved to convert to G360. Tutorials seemed helpful so I jumped right in. Only to discover that a LOT of things were not as simple as they seemed. First, many of the character heads that were demoed or came with the app had fairly round (or cylinder shaped) heads with fairly "flat" facial features. What that meant is that rigging them in 360 editor was pretty easy in most cases - you simply take a standard G3 character as is and with a bit of tweaking you have your 360 head. I quickly discovered that 360-rigging for my dogs wasn't going to be easy because of their stinking noses :). One other thing I discovered in the process is that 360 actually rarely means 360. There is only one character - the blue bird that is set up for about 270 degrees rotation - and it is very unique. Majority of other characters have no more than 90 degree rotation span. And not every character's head can easily lend itself to a full 360 (or even 180 degree) rotation. (In fairness though, I found that 45-60 degrees in each direction is usually quite sufficient for a front or side facing character.)

Anyway, in the resource pack there were three characters with longer snouts: the blue dragon (Puffy), Tumba the pig and the hog. (and before you ask - yes, I watched the hog tutorial x-teen times). Upon closer examination - although it gave me the idea - neither of them looked simple enough to easily base my dog head off of - with multiple layers and lots of additional facial features that I didn't need and I just didn't have the patience or time to dissect them. Long story short after a lot of trial and error I was able to figure out a reasonably simple method that can be applied to any longer snout character and I learned a few lessons in the process.

The trick is: you will need at least two additional layers (in my case I called them Snout-Left and Snout-Right) and those sprites will have to be of specific shape in order for you to successfully mimic different angles for your long nose character. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I am attaching a keynote presentation file (doggy-head.zip) that shows the sprites and how they interact with each other as well as CA project (dog-360-template.zip) with a the dog character. I stripped it down to the bone. The body is just a placeholder from a quadruped template and the head contains the minimum number of sprites that you would need to build a similar head. I also tried to give the layers meaningful names (rather than Nose1, Nose2, Nose3, etc.) to make it easier to understand what is what.

Disclaimer: this is not a complete character and is only provided for demonstration purposes.

This is a short CA4 animation video of what the final result looks like --> Doggy head - final result
This is a video showing how this head is made up --> Doggy head: how it is built
Links point to dropbox - let me know if you have difficulty accessing them.

1) Here's the workflow I used: I built the shapes of bodyparts in Keynote (you could just as easily use PowerPoint or any graphic editor) and then copied them into Affinity Photo to place into the template. 
2) I intentionally kept the borders around
 the shapes to make it clear how the layers move during rotation.
3) The head only rotates to about 45 degrees in each direction horizontally, but you can expand it to 90 degrees using the same idea.
4) The rotation rigging is far from complete: the ears are not always moving in the most realistic way but that is a different challenge altogether. Feel free to play with the character and use it to build your own.

That's pretty much it. Hopefully it will save you some time.
Attachments
dog-360-template.ctProject.zip (133 views, 2.00 MB)
doggy-head.zip (145 views, 1,004.00 KB)
vepop
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Posted 6 Years Ago
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Thanks for the tips.
You're great! 👍

76% of original size (was 661x19) - Click to enlargehttps://forum.reallusion.com/uploads/images/9331d0a4-6a4b-4e86-9f88-963f.jpg
YouTube Tutorials Here
Peter (RL)
Peter (RL)
Posted 6 Years Ago
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Thank you for sharing your workflow and experience with the community Candlelight. We do appreciate it. :)

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com


thomasway
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I also wanted to add my thanks for the description and files.

I wondered why you used a second program like Keynote to do the shapes? Both Affinity programs seem easier to me for creating shapes.
The .MOV file opened easily on my Mac but the .M4V file required me to change its type in Get Info ti open it. Could be I never use M4V but thought I'd let you know for future tutorials. :)


candlelight2007
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thomasway (7/15/2019)

I wondered why you used a second program like Keynote to do the shapes? Both Affinity programs seem easier to me for creating shapes.


That's because I'm not really used to specialized graphic design tools. They intimidate me, quite frankly :w00t::) I can't draw to save my life so Keynote seems less intimidating and more familiar to me. 



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