Animation

I opted to have the jelly baby dance to some music. To enable me to be able to control the movements effectively I used the HI solver to attach some of the bone together. Trial and error was used to establish which bones were more effective attached together.

I added the sound track to the timeline using the track editor curve. This then enabled me to match up the movements more accurately with the music.

I carried out a test render to ascertain an approximate time limit for rendering but encounterd some unkown problems and 3DS Max became non responsive or shut down. I tried using different render set ups to no avail. To try and simplify the information being converted into the .avi file I removed the soundtrack as this could be added later in Adobe Soundbooth. After removing this file the rendering process became more responsive, however when I tried to import this into Soundbooth it did not recognise the codec. 

Big Eyes

I asked some children for their views about the character and the general consensus was that it should have bigger eyes as this would make it cuter. This then led me to have a look around at some other characters already out in the film industry and found that this was indeed the case

Linking it all together

As the eyes and mouth were separate from the body I had to link them to the head bone. At first I tried to attach them to the body itself, but this method did not work.

Them bones them bones

I first decided to use the biped system to rig the jelly baby for movement; however this did not prove to be an effective method so I changed this to the bones system. To enable the jelly baby to move as accurately as possible I had to edit the envelopes to be more in tune with its natural movements. This did take a fair bit of trial and error to make correct.

facial features

EYES
To create the orbital recess the polygons around the eye area were divided up using the cut tool. The vertices of which were then moved to create a more rounded area.  The resulting central polygon was then extruded back to create the orbital floor. The actual eye was created seperately using a sphere as the eyeball with a small hemisphere for the pupil area. This sphere was then copied and increased in size before altering the hemisphere settings to create the upper eyelid. This sphere was copied in order to create the bottom eyelid. Both the eyelids were then moved into position around the eyeball. An FFD box was placed around the first eye and the two linked together using the bind to spacewarp. Some difficulty was experienced in linking the FFD box to the eye, as such the FFD box had to be redone several times before it did work correctly. Due to the problems encountered with this, instead of creating another FFD box around the second eye the first ensemble was copied and the original second eye deleted. Both these were then seated within the orbital space prepared on the  face. The vertices around the orbital area were then finely tuned to fit snugly around the eye.

NOSE

Using the cut tool in polygon mode, the area around the nose was divided up. Switching to vertex mode these were moved to make a basic rounded nose shape. Going back to polygon mode the middle polygon was bevelled out and slighlty inwards a couple of times. The resulting vertices were then edited to finish off the shape.  

MOUTH

The mouth shape on the face proved challenging at first and various methods such as trying to split the edges did not prove to be effective. Ultimately the cut tool was used to break up the polygons around where the mouth opening should be. The central poygons were then deleted to create the opening. The lips were created seperately out of a torus which was then moved into place. Once in place the vertices around the mouth opening and the torus shape itself were manipulated until a satisfactory shape was acheived.

modelling process

The jelly baby started life as a cube 6x6x6 faces. After this was converted to an editable poly the polygons in the middle of the top section were selected and bevelled upwards and in/out to create the basic head shape. The selection mode was then changed to vertex and soft selection used to manipulate the head into a more rounded shape. Going back to polygon mode the two rows of polygons on each side of the base of the cube were extruded out several times to make the legs. The bottom polygon at the front of each leg was the bevelled out and inwards a few times to create the foot shape. Converting back to vertex mode and soft selection the vertices on the front were manipulated to create a more rounded look, especially across the belly area and the legs. The back of the jelly baby was deliberately left flat as this is how they are. The arms were created the same as the legs, however it took several attempts to work out which polygons provided the best effect to create the da vinci pose. Switching back to vertex mode and using soft selection the arms were made more rounded.

drawings

before working on the 3D model of the jelly baby I did some drawings as a guideline.