Many a things has happened since the cat. The first thing being that the cat was suddenly ditched for a Komodo Dragon, and Thus KOMOTAUR was born. (Komodo-Centaur, you got it :)  )

I'm missing a fair few steps of my process here, but I'll put up as many various steps as I can, hopefully all of the work that's gone into it can be seen in the final. If I was to bullet point my process from here it would be something like this:

• Animating a walk cycle referring to Komodo Dragons and other lizards

• Playing with Blendshapes to get some facial emotions going, and seeing how I could plug them into my model and animated sequence.

•  Key Framing different run cycle styles to see which one fitted my creature the bestestest 

•  Animating the chosen run cycle 

•  making a spear which I then canned for my old spear which was a million times betterer

•  Using Zbrush and Maya to create some Armour, eyes, and a Scaly Lizard Texture 

•  Being annoyed that I sculpted out heaps of scales and spikes for a cool normal map and then not having it work because I didn't have a good think that my high res sculpting would affect the base mesh and therefore make maps for the wrong mesh. Bugger. BUT I will put up some tasty screen shots of the scaly lizard because he is cooler than the final animated fella. 

•  Animating the Jump and throw 

•  Animating the final Showdown sequence to show the run cycle, Interaction with another character, function with a prop and emotion right at the end 

•  Bit of fair play with After Effects to export a final movie 

•  Doing this Blog. Because I was naughty and didn't do it during. Sorry.

After this essayish write up I'll be posting screen shots and some final animations.

ALSO on a HUUUUUUGE note my final run cycle did NOT RENDER PROPERLY!! This meant that it did not feature in my final as planned, but you still saw him running so hopefully it is okay. ish.

Walk Cycle

Soooo..... I needed to figure out how my centaur was gunna walk, so i had to try and reference a quadruped as well as my own walking. I found this cat, it's pretty good seeing as my centaur is supposed to be panther like, here he is :D


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzt18V3Uaxc

Okay so it's been a while but I now have a functioning rig for my Centaur, need to touch up some weights and set up some set driven keys before moving onto animating and blendshapes. should have a walk cycle for tomorrow 

So it turns out that Topogun 2 is super amazingly good for retopologizing hi-res models. So I've sculpted out a high res centaur for the animation project and now i'm boosting through the retopologizing. 

Final Turntable, I made a small terrain to give him a bit of setting, could hopefully use it for the animating project as well.

Here's a nicer render with some passes of the final thing from the turntable, hope it's a winner

Some more Stepping stones

Many of my process screens have been getting lost from my computer crashing while the photoshop set up was open which is a bit annoying, but I've broken down the steps to upload some steps to see how I got there since my last post. I didn't get very far with the rigging, as the process I was learning off digital tutors was very time heavy and I wanted to focus more on getting a well presented final turntable.

Most of my time was spent sculpting in Zbrush, as it is a part of the design process that I really enjoy and feel  the most confident with, so I felt that getting some good work out of there would benefit the final outcome.

Unfortunately this was at the cost of not learning more in maya, and I did not manage to export the normal and displacement maps back into maya when the push came to shove, so I instead set up a lighting system in Zbrush for the final turntable.

As far as the process goes, I have delved into each step, and ultimately not got there with the final few, but I was fairly happy with the Zbrush turntable that I handed in. As far as fitting the brief I'm not so sure I hit the mark there but I know now how to fix up my character for rigging for the next assignment, should be cool to get animating.

Also, as I have shown with some of the screens uploaded here I did a revamp of my character to work with a much more exaggerated body type. I decided that I wasn't going for a hyper real character, I was more looking for a stylized game character, so he's very stretched, tall and thin with really broad shoulders and a tiny waist, and humongous feet to allow some comically large boots.

Anyway here are the rest of my process screens, rig included: