Week 12

The last scenes show the penguin cutting toast in mid air with his samurai sword. This scene to me looked very good as the sword swings seemed to have been better and more fluid then the previous scenes attempt. The idea of the bread was to bounce onto the plate and split into different pieces to give a cliché and intertextuality event with old samurai films. Getting the bread to actually split was a difficult task, originally I was going to use a technique I had previous knowledge in which was used to shatter glass but on a smaller and less violent way. The technique was to use a physics array on the bread in combination with a gravity system warp so that the bread would split and fall onto the plate. Unfortunately this caused the bread to fly off into the distance even with a very high gravity setting.
To counter this I then created a separate scene to create the split bread and have it split and hit the plate to end that small scene.

Week 11

Animating the scene of the penguin putting on his sword sheath and picking up my blade in my opinion went very well and became my favourite scene just because the handing over of the sheath from one hand to another and putting it one looked very natural and was simply done by moving the bone sin the penguin’s arms.
In the same scene the penguin swings his sword around before placing it in his sheath, this was simple to animate but when watched I believed did not look overly good but still had some good parts of being able to actually get the penguin to swing his sword properly.

Week 10

I created a small bedroom that the penguin could start from as I wanted from my storyboard, to get the desired effect of the penguin moving all that was needed was the bones to be adjusted for the arms to move in the ways needed. The sword and kabuto were also taken from the penguin model and placed in the room so that the penguin could interact with them.
Most of the pieces in the room where made from simple shapes and with some objects like the chair simple shapes where booleaned together to create the desired piece.

Getting the penguin to walk was rather simple, the legs could be easily rotated with the foot which gave the impression that the penguin walked. With the walking there were some problems during the walking it looked very jagged and natural but was unable to resolve this, also while animating the walking sometimes the bones would come apart for what seemed to be no reason and caused difficulty during it.

Week 9

I then began work on the sword which would be required in the animation with the penguin, the sword used a square with one end bended and the vertices joined so that it gives the effect of a slightly curved blade. The hand guard of the blade was an image that was traced over with the line tool and then extruded and placed with the blade.
The grip of the blade used a simple cylinder which then used a material to give the grip a better look, with the grip material I then created another material and used it as a bump material to give a slight outline to the decal on the blade.
The blade uses a nice metallic chrome material to give the blade a slight shine. The handgrip uses the same dark gold material that was used with the hat/kabuto symbol which adds consistency.
The sheath of the blade was simply a copy of the blade re sized so that the blade could fit within the sheath.

The final full penguin model looked like this; the model pleased me as with its textures it looked good and worked fine with the bones I had placed within the body.

Week 8

The armoured skirt was changed again as the first was too flat for my liking, the new armoured skirt was drawn along the side and then extruded using the extrude modifier and placed vertices at certain distances so that it could be bent around the penguins stomach and connect all 4 pieces of the armour.
With the new armoured skirt I wanted something else to make the penguin look more like a samurai and decided to create a simple hat. The hat started as half a sphere to act as the top of the hat, and then used the line tool to create the layers of armour that come down from the top of the hat. Then I added a simple symbol on the front which used a dark gold material to make it look like a gold piece used in samurai war armour.

I then began the process of boning the character beginning with the bones I had decided on earlier from when I designed the head and began to work with the arms and legs so that the penguin could more when placed in scenes.

Week 7

While created the skirt I decided to attempt to create a new body as the original looked blocky and had very fat arms which I believed would cause problems during animating as it would make any movement in the arm show up and cause very little errors to become more noticeable. The new body was created with the aim to be more rounds and have the extruded arms to be smaller but big enough to look good. With the new body I was satisfied with the outcome.
I then created a belt for the armoured skirt out of a simple line and extruded which gave it a very thing look which I believed looked good. Originally I had planned the belt to be actual cloth by using a cloth modifier but because there is nothing on the armoured skirt holding it in place it caused the belt to fall through the skirt and off the screen so keeping the belt as it was and to find a good cloth looking texture was the answer.

Week 6

I then imported the head from another file and placed it on the body so that I could adjust the penguin’s neck and get an overall look of a nearly complete body.
I also increased the extrusion of the ‘chest bump’ as I had started to call it which is going to be used to create a white chest and stomach for the penguin and to give it a more rounded look when turbo smoothed.

I then turbo smoothed the whole body and created proper legs for the penguin, these legs which I made from cylinders initially where made to be thigh like so were created fat and long and then bevelled into more thin bits which connect to the feet which has been smoothed and resized to fit the legs better. I decided not to actually join the legs to the body as they would mostly be hidden anyway with the creation of an armoured skirt. The armoured skirt is a traditional piece of samurai armour and worked well at concealing the legs while making the penguin look more samurai like.
The armoured skirt was designed to use 4 planes in a jagged position to give the impression that they where layered like an armoured skirt would be.

Week 5

After completing the head I decided to start work on the characters body using a single square to start the body I then adjusted the vertices to get a more prism like body so that when smoothed the penguin would be round. From this square I then extruded the lower portion of the body with the edit poly and polygon function until I was satisfied with the height of the actual penguin. From this I then bevelled in the penguins lower part to create a kind of waist/hip area that the legs could be attached to or extruded from.
For the arms I selected some polygons from the side of the penguin and extruded them to make an arm which could reach down to where I hoped the penguin’s leg for later use. The arms like the rest of the body would require a turbo smooth to be more wing/arm like.
I added some simple legs to get an overall assessment of the body but created simple feet which could be improved for later use.

Week 4

With the head modelled I then modelled a pair of eyes and imported them into the scene. With he eyes imported in I then tried to adjust the vertices in the head to give the eyes more of a look that they were in the head instead of an unnatural look, I had to also rotate the eyes so that they could face forward but also keep them to the side of the head like a normal penguin but have them enough facing forward that the character looks normal.

With the eyes in a relatively good position I then added a simple black/charcoal texture over the head and beak, with the beak though I also added an orange stripe along the joining parts of the upper and lower beak by using a sub material with the black of the beak.
With the textures in the head and beak I then began to attempt to move the beak using a skin modifier and a set of bones to attempt to move the beak parts up and down and check for any errors with the way I had set out and created the head, fortunately I found no problems and as I predicted did not get any skin pinches or problems when moving the beak.

Week 3

To do the beak tip I converted the beak into an editable poly and extruded the edges of the beak to create a pointed tip for each part, I did this because a normal cone would look too straight and a penguin beak is somewhat curved which adds more of a natural element to its well as allowing me to move the edges so that the beak tip contained a bit of a bump like the penguin I used to map from.

Week 2

To get the general shape of the penguins head I began by adding a picture of a front and side facing penguin to two different planes and attempted to mould the objects used to create the head to fit these much like topology but instead of using quads using the existing object and using editable poly with adjusting the vertices for the shape.

Using a sphere and a cone I could easily create a head and beak which could then have the vertices moved so that they were more attached then a completely curved cone into one that was not completely round but fit the penguins head so that it did not look unnatural.