CAP 3D Modeling Project

To add to the chain of opinions on the fire arms, I personally don't mind the teardrop shape on the 'hands,' but they do look a bit weird at the shoulder point imo; and even then, only the front one.
 

snake

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CAP Co-Leader
Pyroak's rigging is done and also the shaders for his "fire-arms". I've been mostly focusing on the fire effects for now, animations will come later.
Big thanks to Cretacerus, Darquezze and Quanyails for their feedback :D




Stratagem has outlines but they're very thin. It was rendered back when my line compo knowledge was poor so those shaders weren't very good. I'll re-render him when I get the chance. Thanks for the heads up!

Glad you like ^_^ I'm still working to get them more like the official style before they go on PS so there'll be updates coming soon™
Amazing. I like the shoulder fire, but I'm not such a fan of the arm cannon fire. Maybe there could be fire burning deeper inside of the cannons but not actively exiting them? Like it's getting ready to fire them.
 

G-Luke

Sugar, Spice and One For All
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Amazing. I like the shoulder fire, but I'm not such a fan of the arm cannon fire. Maybe there could be fire burning deeper inside of the cannons but not actively exiting them? Like it's getting ready to fire them.
I agree with snek here, the cannons themselves shouldn't be on fire, but have fire charging within them.
Beautiful designs as always tho.

Also, is there more progress on the prevos?
 

HeaLnDeaL

Let's Keep Fighting
is an Artistis a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a CAP Contributor Alumnus
My biggest issue with them, QxC, is that the flames are made in a very noticeable 'teardrop' shape which doesn't really emulate how fire would work at all and that I'm not sure the flamethrower hands would be kept constantly ignited. The actual oscillation of the color and tonality is on point, though.
I agree. Once you told me about the teardrop shape I haven't been able to un-see it.

Also, something about the twist in the torso and the breastplate facing far right but the legs facing forward and the head facing left.... seems... idk... over twisted? I fully get the body twists and different planes face different ways, but they seem to be facing directions that are just a bit too different for me to think it reads as a cohesive body. I realize the perspective is technically correct, but it looks like it shouldn't be? Idk. But overall this is a super minor nitpick.

Great job with the model though, looking good : )
 

epicparker

Banned deucer.
Hey QxC4eva

I'm just getting into modeling (taking a class this semester) and your work is incredible. Do you have any videos of you speed-modeling or something? (is that a thing? idek) Or any recommendations on Youtube? I'd love to see how people who are actually good work at this so I can better understand the process, since that's a lot of what's lacking for me. Thanks!
 

QxC4eva

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I decided to revisit KrazyCake's Fidgit model to finish off the QC for it (the last update was here). Cake did a fantastic job on the model, it was his very first one too and he managed to do it by just messing around in Blender. No tuts or anything @_@ how cool is that!! I'd like to congratulate him and hope he keeps making more models! As for the QC it's mainly fixing up a few mistakes with the topology, mostly in the head and elbows. I simplified some parts where there's too many triangles and added more divisions on the arms so he can deform properly. The polycount reduced from 22,396 to 13,944 triangles.

Cake has given me the green light to start on the textures

which I then made progress to the rigging:



And here's an animation to test out the rig.



The source files are here.


On another note thanks for everyone's comments for Pyroak!
My biggest issue with them, QxC, is that the flames are made in a very noticeable 'teardrop' shape which doesn't really emulate how fire would work at all and that I'm not sure the flamethrower hands would be kept constantly ignited. The actual oscillation of the color and tonality is on point, though.
Very well spotted....it was something I was trying to hide but you saw me through :U I'll try adding another stencil map on the tip and if it doesn't work I guess I'll settle for a displacement filter or something. If you or anyone has other ideas it'll be great hear them too!

Amazing. I like the shoulder fire, but I'm not such a fan of the arm cannon fire. Maybe there could be fire burning deeper inside of the cannons but not actively exiting them? Like it's getting ready to fire them.
Great idea. I'll see how it turns out and get back to you~

I agree with snek here, the cannons themselves shouldn't be on fire, but have fire charging within them.
Beautiful designs as always tho.

Also, is there more progress on the prevos?
The plan was to work on prevos too but there's only so much I can juggle ^^; I'll try to get in one of them every 2-3 updates (so maybe in the next one)

I agree. Once you told me about the teardrop shape I haven't been able to un-see it.

Also, something about the twist in the torso and the breastplate facing far right but the legs facing forward and the head facing left.... seems... idk... over twisted? I fully get the body twists and different planes face different ways, but they seem to be facing directions that are just a bit too different for me to think it reads as a cohesive body. I realize the perspective is technically correct, but it looks like it shouldn't be? Idk. But overall this is a super minor nitpick.

Great job with the model though, looking good : )
I checked back and wow what a silly move for me to not give the vest any bones. I see what you mean, I guess I'll redo the binds so they can bend back a bit in that pose :P

Hey QxC4eva

I'm just getting into modeling (taking a class this semester) and your work is incredible. Do you have any videos of you speed-modeling or something? (is that a thing? idek) Or any recommendations on Youtube? I'd love to see how people who are actually good work at this so I can better understand the process, since that's a lot of what's lacking for me. Thanks!
Hello! Good luck with the modeling classes I hope you learn a lot from them and have fun :) Video tuts is something I always wanted to do except I don't think I'm good enough to teach stuff yet. I'm only slowly getting there. Check back after a year or two! :D

As for speed modeling vids they don't tend to show that much. They go pretty fast and modelers have the habit of using keyboard shortcuts all the time so what happens is you'll see stuff coming out of nowhere like some sort of black magic. I guess they're great to give you an insight but that's about it. Green Blender has some decent pokemon modeling vids if you want to check those out!
 

Reiga

im dying squirtle
is a Top Artist
beautiful spider man... I love the spinning drill, and while it ended really wide, this model catches Fidgit's look surprisingly well, since while it isn't a jumbled mess of fidgetting parts, which would be a nightmare to model, really sells his cute little multi-legged look. I love his little jiggles!
 

G-Luke

Sugar, Spice and One For All
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I think an active sprite with one or two of Fidget's hands doing something would reflect its constantly moving nature a lot better
 
I think an active sprite with one or two of Fidget's hands doing something would reflect its constantly moving nature a lot better
Yeah, I think the sprite should emphasize Fidgit's constantly moving nature. I was thinking something more like Hitmonchan, where it bounces back and forth.
 

snake

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What if Fidgit lifted two of its opposing hands and went in a circle?

If you numbered the hands from 1 to 8, 1 and 5 would be raised and lowered, then 2 and 6, then 3 and 7, then 4 and 8, and then it's back to 1 and 5 again.

If that sounds too mechanical, the hands could be more random.
 

Take Azelfie

More flags more fun
I was also thinking about what if the drill wasn't always constantly spinning. What if it took a break, turn backwards a little bit, then continued going forward. I wouldn't think it would just always constantly be spinning one direction
 
Even though I'm pretty certain that's a test, the drill rn goes a couple pixels under the groundline created by the hands. So, unless Fidgit is constantly flinging dirt everywhere and leaves behind an indentation on the ground when moving, the angle for the upper arms should be fixed to lift its body more.
 

QxC4eva

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It's cute time!

To celebrate paintseagull's return here's a model of Scratchet in its very early stage (nope, not a speed model this time)
Gonna get this ready so PSG can do some texturing! Let's hope she'll stick around too c:

All eyes will be on Paj now as we try to get something in for the playtest. Here's the model sheet corrected by Reigaheres


And here's the baby by himself. There's a wisp on his hat when he's woke :)


If you're interested helping us out on this model please let me know. You can see what's available in this spreadsheet.

For Fidgit I'll definitely try out variations with your ideas, snake_rattler and Take Azelfie and see how they look! And of course thanks to Zephias for destroying me once again with his right on point critique X)
 
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QxC4eva

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Here is Smolgon's wireframe made by KrazyCake!

Triangles: 5046
Vertices: 2580
UVs: 2760

And Dreamgon's wireframe made by me.

Triangles: 11148
Vertices: 5657
UVs: 6095

Special mention to Reigaheres, Cretacerus and Quanyails for giving us feedback on them. The models and Scratchet have been UV mapped and ready for texturing. I won't be texturing either of them this time (got someone better for that!)


Here's the UV maps (with annotations):
 
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You guys have done an amazing job on Pajantom so far! I didn't even know Creta utilized 3D modeling until he revealed the Pajantom model.
 

QxC4eva

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Pajantom is coming to town. Merry Christmas CAP!


With help from Zephias the rigging is done and he's ready for animation. I'm gonna gush about the rigs here cause we've barely talked about rigging in this thread and I think it's a good time to show the hard work done by our rigging artists.
I think rigging is one of the hardest, if not the hardest step in the process and it can have all sorts of complications depending on the design. Zephias did the rig for Smolgon includes laying out the skeleton and binding it to the model. There's been some issues with the skin weights I had to fix, but overall it's a very clean job so well done Zeph!! Here's some poses to test out the binding.


And here's Dreamgon's rig. The bones on his tail may look weird poking out the mesh like that and a few modelers pointed it out to me. It was intentional. I did it to simplify the curve structure for the spline IK and to keep a clean arc for posing. There's also less chance it'll go crazy under a turbulence field (which can happen on a very squiggly line). I binded the mesh with dual quaternions to get it to conserve volume.


For the animation controllers it's a bit tricky cause of how Pajantom's physics works. We have Dreamgon carrying Smolgon on his back, but Smolgon's hat carries the tail of the Dreamgon and it traces back to Dreamgon's body, so who is carrying who??? Well, here's how I went about it. First I made sure it had to be the Dreamgon carrying Smolgon, as he exerts a greater influence on Smolgon than Smolgon can ever counter-exert from his hat. So with all movement coming from the Dreamgon, the base of his tail should naturally fall under his control too. Smolgon's hat will also control the tail, but only from the tip, so it's like the tail is an elastic rope pulled by both dragons from opposite ends. To achieve the elastic effect I used a spline IK on a bezier running along the tail and gave it cluster handles on each of the vertices (shown by the "C" handles in the screenshot). I then wrote a script to stretch the tail joints based on the curve's current length. The vertex at the very tip of the tail will be parented to Smolgon's hat so I can move him around without ever losing hold of the Dream's tail. No matter how far away I move him, the tail should stretch to accommodate the pose! Makes the animation far much easier :D


Wisps are driven by hair dynamics with a turbulence field. I didn't end up using soft body cause the only physics I needed there was drag and gravity. Like most physics it doesn't loop properly, but it can be fixed by rendering a loop further down the timeline (like frames 500-579 instead of 1-80) to drown out the initial pose. The wavy effect was done by sine deformer with an offset phase.
 
To expand a bit on what QxC mentioned about rigging: One of the biggest problems with rigging is that different animators work with rigs in different ways, and therefore the way they rig is quite different. I'd like to use my participation with Smolgon to expand on that by comparing the original rig I did vs the modified one QxC used for the position tests.



Those who look carefully will already see some notable differences. First off, I did not rig the flame on Pajantom's head. This was because during the rigging, QxC mentioned his intentions to use a sine deformer. As an animator, I prefer to rig those myself to control the movement better, so I left it without rigging. Adding those bones is rather easy, takes no more than five minutes, so it wasn't an issue.

Next, I'd like to point out how the shoulder and body joints are connected. If you take a look at QxC's final rig, he has bones connecting the entire rig making it all one interconnected skeleton, while in my version the arms, legs and tail are disconnected from the main body. I usually don't connect extremities to the body and instead utilize bound offsets to make the whole rig move as one structure despite its separation.

On the long term both options behave similarly, with the only difference being that more bones allow for flexibility in some areas that offset bindings don't. It's a style decision that relates to how each person animates, and any aspiring rig artist/animator should learn both and see how they like to work. QxC also added bones to the horns of the hat, something I didn't do because that part was, in my opinion, rigid and thus should move alongside the headbone and first hatbone instead.

Finally, QxC subdivided a fair amount of the bones I made to give the rig itself more flexibility in terms of bone placement for the animation. That compiles all the main differences between the OG rig and the final rig.

Now, onto the weight issues QxC mentioned: When rigging, the process normally goes in the following order:

1. Make your rig
2. Bind your rig to your wireframe, using automatic weights.
3. Fix whatever weight issues show up.
4. Test rig to destruction. If issues show, return to step 3.

In this particular rig, there was a major weight problem in the rim of the hat. Since the rim and horns were a separate object that had been overlapped with the hat to create the wireframe and as such extended a little into the hat itself, the rig bound this part of the hat to the second and first hatbones. It meant that when one was deforming the hat by moving the 2nd hatbone, the rim of the hat would randomly fly through Paj's forehead as can be seen below. you can also see the offset technique I mentioned before, shown by the dotted line between the headbone and the nosebone.


Note how the hat remains stationary, but the rim is lifted awkwardly. To fix that, I had to select every face in that part of the hat and unbind them from the 1st and 2nd hatbones' spheres of influence. It was the most time-consuming part of the rigging, easily. Crafting the rig itself took around 20 minutes, while properly removing this issue took almost two hours. The issue was that I had to select every face, because if I missed a couple then one or two faces would shoot out like spikes from the rim of the hat every time the 2nd hatbone was moved. The curved horns made this a difficult task. I can only imagine the weight issues mentioned by QxC were related to this as well, probably created after subdividing. There were also probably some on the shoulder rotations, either created by the new bindings or something I forgot to fix.

Weight painting is, in my opinion, the most difficult part of rigging since oftentimes things fold in strange ways. It is around 85 to 95% of the time spent rigging, especially in more complex builds. Pajantom-Smol had the advantage of not having fingers, which are normally some of the more complicated parts of a rig. One of the main rules of rigging is to always have one or two people QCing because you will always miss one or two weight problems.

I'm probably gonna offer myself as the main rigging artist for the project, since it's something I'm rather experienced with. I very much encourage people to try it out, especially with smaller and less-complicated rigs like Pajantom-Smol was (Which would probably be any pre-evolutions we model). It's a rewarding experience, and can be quite fun. You can come to me for any questions.
 
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epicparker

Banned deucer.
Not sure if now is the time for comments or whatever, but looking at the animation on Pajantom's finished product thread, the Dreamgon's tail looks kind of stiff. Most parts have that spirit-y waviness like on the wisps, but the tail feels more like a physical, odd-shaped tail than a genie-esque wispy tail because it all moves together for the most part. Although it looks like y'all are still talking about animating so maybe that's just a WIP kind of thing they posted in that thread so they'd have something to show? Idk anyway overall it looks frickin incredible don't let my nitpickiness take away from that. Beautiful work, my dudes.
 

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