After my much enjoyment of making a sculpture of kitty in Super Sculpey clay I wanted to model something else. I thought it would be a good idea to model the cart and a little section of the track.

I enjoy modelling as much as in Maya as I do with my hands with clay. Though I like the traditional feeling of a 'hand on' approach with clay with the model in front of you to move and mold as you wish.

This is what I have produced :)

Here I used foil to bulk out the cart so that I don't use too much of the clay and not too make it heavy.

Here is the wire structure of the track that I drilled into the MDF base and used milliput to bond the tops together.

Added the cay to the wire structure.

This is the finished model below.

I would have put basic models of the characters inside the cart but I ran out of clay :( but
overall I am very please with the end results. I might paint the model as well, but am unsure as of yet!

I was looking at some picture from the Internet to look at the facial line where they lie on the face. I marked out what I wanted to look at in a white line.



Theses were really helpful in looking at the facial detail and all the wrinkles with in the face. After looking at these pictures I changed Kitty's face to look more human like. From the picture in the past post you can see the difference between the two.

For the fence around the ride there is a gate which has a chain around it locking it together. I was looking into using Dynamic for the chain so as the character come thought the gate the chain will rattle as they go though. . This seems quite simple in theory but harder in practice.
The first part was getting the chain to interact with its self, so it can be linked together. The problem that I found out was this only worked well if each chain link was bout 8 polygons, it didn't like anything higher than this.

I founds another way of linking the chains together through bones and parenting each link to a joint and trying it that way. The only problem with this was that is didn't really move link a chain.

The chain seems the move about unnecessary and doesn't look rite


It kinda works on this one, but its only a low polygon chain :(



Here is one where the links are parented together but doesn't really move like a chain. Though it gives the sense of chain like movement.




The next thing I will try is using cluster with a curve to make the chain links move. This will have to be animated by hand though as the gate opens. This could be the best way of doing this.
Just have to wait and find out.....

I thought I near enough finished Kitty's head but upon showing Dan Cripps he suggested to to add more definition to the smile wrinkle around here mouth. The picture below is where the new definition will be added.
Dan said to raise the smile wrinkle to where the green dotted line is and the red dotted line is where I had it at present.

This is what I achieved. On the Left you have the original version and on the right the new version. The white lines is what I have altered.
Thought the straight line on the left is an Error ! Whoops

Here you can see this more clearly with out the wire frame on. I also added more to define the nose so it didn't flow into the face, and more on the eyes


Some more pictures of Kitty's head from low poly to a high poly mesh

lol Whats a scary picture !

She had a full set of teeth and a tongue but hard to see at the moment.


These are to show how close the model is to the picture that was drawn by Dan Ryan

Here are a few pictures of her body which is working in progress, so there not finished yet as you can see.
Things are coming alone quite nicely i feel and it shouldn't be too long till there done : )

Right, lets bring you up to speed on what I have done so far. I have done a few prop modeling for the mine cart section and a little on the exterior. The main focus has been on kitty so far.

Also I have been working on another sculpture of the ride. Pictures will be up soon !

Now that the dreaded dissertation draft is handed in for it to be looked at, now I can go back to what I love, Modelling ! yay
The next two weeks I can really concentrate hard on the film project getting things done. Well that's the plan, because I haven't done as much as I hoped, but now is my chance to make up for it !