In these videos we show you how to rig a stylized cartoon fish with fins and blinking eyes. We start off by creating skelegons to get movement in the fins and make them deform as if our fish is swimming through water. Animating eyelids on a character can be tricky, so for this we set up our skelegons with endomorphs. During these parts you'll learn how to prevent intersecting geometry on an animated model, make blinking eyelids and rolling eyeballs. The techniques shown for this can be applied to any sort of character model.
We then create weight maps for the body and fin skelegons, set up hierarchies for the basic rig and convert the skelegons to bones. From here we set orientation for the bones and add some smaller bones to the eyelids for proper rotation. We then look at how the model deforms and adjust the rig make the fish move in a realistic way without any intersecting geometry. We also look at setting up animation controls before we create a few different key poses for the fish.
Finally we set up animation keys on the timeline, as well as go over how to paint the textures in Photoshop and create a set up for bubbles in water with particles. Here we take a look at some important camera properties when rendering particles in Lightwave. This tutorial also covers a quick run through of the different materials used for the fish, eye textures and lighting the scene.
Scene files containing the unrigged and fully rigged fish in the underwater environment are included with this tutorial. If you are interested in creating your own cartoon fish you can find the Cartoon Fish Volume 1 - Modeling Tutorial in the modeling and projects section on SimplyLightwave.
Length:
2
Hours
41
Minutes
Instructor:
Philip Meyer
Format:
MPEG-4
Points Cost:
14
Price: $24.95
Covers
Rigging with Skelegons
Creating Bones & Weight Maps
Eyelid Setup for Blinking
Creating Moving Eye Pupils
Underwater Bubbles with Particles
Preview this tutorial
More Items to Consider
Welcome to SimplyLightwave.com. Please login to download tutorials.
Individual Lesson Download
Cartoon Fish Volume 2 - Rigging and Posing
Credits
Length
Size
Download Lesson 1
2
24
Mins
27
MB
Download Lesson 2
3
31
Mins
35
MB
Download Lesson 3
2
21
Mins
26
MB
Download Lesson 4
3
33
Mins
41
MB
Download Lesson 5
2
30
Mins
32
MB
Download Lesson 6
2
22
Mins
20
MB
Totals:
14
/
14
2
H
41
M
181
MB
About Simply Lightwave
A little bit about who we are
Useful links
Some links you might have missed
Connect with us
Catch up with Simply Lightwave
SimplyLightwave has been teaching Lightwave for 10 years. We currently have the largest training library for Lightwave online.
Our tutorials are designed to get you up and running in Lightwave quickly without making it seem like hard work.
