Update and Tentacle Tests…

t’s been a little while since I have updated, but between the holidays and getting back into the swing of things after the holidays everything has just now settled down a bit.

The Marty project started to bore me a little bit as I had already done the modeling, rigging, and walk cycle for him. I’m going to call him done for now until I can come up with something else that I want him to do. Maybe a short animation with both Bone and Marty?? We’ll see…

I haven’t been completely idle the past few weeks. I have been playing with some techniques in Tony Mullen’s Bounce, Tumble, and Splash, which is an excellent book that goes over simulating real world events in Blender. There is a lot of discussion on physical events, such as bouncing balls, pouring water, jumping springs, etc. It’s all really interesting and there is a surprising amount of work that goes into making computer generated images look and act like real life.

Playing with all the physics engines in Blender made me think about incorporating some of these things in with a character, so I set out trying to come up with something. What came out is based actually on a friend of mine’s father (he doesn’t actually look like this, but bear with me). I spent a great deal of time while I was younger at a friend’s house who had a pool. Well, his father, who had a fairly large belly, would often join us. It was quite interesting because he wasn’t the stereotypical picture of a swimmer, but it was really amazing the way he could dive in without making a splash and swim like a fish! What came out is a part man (with a belly!), part mermaid (with the flippers), and part squid (with the tentacles). The tentacles I thought would be interesting to animate and it may be fun to have him dive into some water. I call him Cephy, short for Cephalopod.

I’ve now modeled most of his body and am working on the tentacles on his head. The tentacles are tricky because there are a couple of different ways to create the tentacle in Blender. One way is simply to model all of them and apply a softbody to the mesh, but this would take quite a while as I’m thinking of having 6-8 tentacles. Another way to create a tentacle is to have a mesh object follow a curve object. This is done with an Array modifier and a Curve modifier put on the mesh. I played around with this one for a while, but I couldn’t quite get the taper to a point to look good. The taper on the object is based on an offset and I just couldn’t quite get it to look good. The final way that I tried was to give a curve a Bevel Object (shape) and a Taper Object. Both of these objects must be curves, which I had never really worked with before, but turns out to be pretty much the best way of doing this. Below is a video of the Curve tentacle and Object tentacle with a quick little animation to see how they react.

Finally, here is a quick video of something similar to the back of the head that I am imagining for Cephy.