Rigging and Weight Painting

Well, someone has to do all this rigging right?  I took up the initiative to learn how to do it.  Now I'm at the painting weights part.  It's not my favorite thing in the world, but I'll do it.  I've done it before in earlier versions of Maya and 2012 Maya is a bit better and nicer when it comes to weighting.  Hopefully I'll get through this without killing my mouse due to poor weights :(

I'm actually following a tutorial on Digitaltutors.com  so hopefully my rat will turn out OK.  I've also been asking help from my 3D modeling teacher. Now, the only problem I'm having while doing this is thinking "Well, my rat is paper, so how will it actually move?"  HOW DOES A PAPER RAT MOVE? I guess I'll look at real rats for now and figure something out.

Speed Sculpt

Here's a speed sculpt I did for my Art II class.  Did this in about an hour :)  Not bad for my first one, eh?

Rigging the Rat

I've started rigging the Rat model.  I'm not too familiar with rigging, so I'm following some videos on Digital Tutorials.   I also need to research the pipeline on how to get this stuff into Unity efficiently.  Well, hopefully this all works out :)

Cat UVing

I'm not a master at UVing, but I gotta do it.  So, here's what I have done thus far for our cat UVs.

Quick Cat Change

After looking at my cat, and getting opinions from a few others, I quickly touched up the cat. I made it skinnier, made the head smaller, fixed up the belly, deleted and re-made the tail so it comes out of the back, and also fixed the joints in the legs to be more cat like.

The Cat

So, I modeled our cat!  I tried making the legs like I did the rat, but it just was not working out.  So, I modeled them as is if they were coming from the inside.  Now, I will UV map the cat and give it off to the other artist to texture then I will start rigging the rat :)

UV mapping and frustration with Maya 2012

Maya 2012, how I love and hate you.  You lag and crash when I UV map -sigh-.  I had to export my Maya 2012 mb file to a ma file and open it in Maya 2011.  Worked SO much better when I UV mapped my rat! I extracted the ear and the legs and mapped them then mapped the body. Then I duplicated the legs and ear over then combined them back to the body.