So in order to get this game started, I need to create a main character rig of this mug which will be the 3rd person player in my game. I have chosen this one as its my favourite mug of Pey-Chi’s pottery. I will now try and edit the already existing model from turboquid.com and try and get it as close to this as I can. I will need to add the facial expressions, the skin of the mug and to mould the mug so that there is a more hand made aspect.
I took a mug from the turbo squid site where I downloaded this mug for free as a starting point. I now needed to make the different components to create the face and mug to the mug. The eyes and nose were quite simply made using spheres and squashing the shape. The mouth was much more challenging as when I used the squash tool it made the lips different thickness at different points. I then tried to draw the mouth free hand and extrude the line to a tube. This looked sloppy and uneven, I attempted this a few times but didn’t seem to work well. I then remembered this mirroring effect I did in Houdini which I could also do in Maya.
This is the tutorial I used to draw half the mouth and then mirror it using the duplicate special in the drop down menu. When I change the settings to mirrored it resolves my issue and as you can see below, the model looks like the original ceramic mug.
Now I have to create the same pattern of the blue sky onto the mug. I took outlines of clouds on line and made them into a vector shape in Illustrator where I could make some sort of skin for the mug. I wasn’t sure how dense the clouds needed to be so made two versions.
Here I have added on the texture but it doesn’t seem to meet up very nicely. Obviously this is because it is not a flat shape for the image to wrap around. I added in a sky dome light to test what it would look like as you can see below.
I think I need to learn more about UV textures so that the mug doesn’t look like a sloppy digital model but more like a ceramics mug. I also need to get the eyes looking as though they are apart of the mug and not just stuck on. So to bridge the game on the edge of the eyes and the mug. I also want to make the mug textured and more natural looking as this is why I choose the ceramics mugs. They look lovely in their imperfections. This mug has been glazed so there needs to be a shiny outer shell as well which I need to figure out.
After I complete this I will then be onto the rigging on this model. I think it will be a simple bending of a spine and hopping along similar to other animated objects like Chip and Miss Pots from beauty and the beast.
I thought of two different ways of rigging this mug. First is simple like the tea cup above with swash and stretch like a bouncing ball or I could make the rig more complex like a walking sack of sand with the handle as either the arm like on a hip or and ear. I will have to attempt both so that I can see which one might look good but I assume it would be better to do the first one as i don’t want to over complicate things as its my first go and also I don’t want to loose the mug shape as this is very important to the game and the designer.