Chelsea Butler

For this tutorial, I have created four mouth shapes and blended them out to create smooth transitions. I had a little difficulty smoothing the 'In' mouth shape as the geometry was folding in on itself, so this took me longer to correct, however I am happy with how they have turned out.

This tutorial was pretty straightforward with the skin weighting and rigging the tongue. I think the only tedious part was getting the teeth and tongue to fit the mouth convincingly, but this was resolved quickly.

I have now completed the rigging of the mouth for Jet Pack Jones. I managed to get through this tutorial a little quicker than the previous one, and now I shall move on to creating the teeth and tongue for the model.

I found this tutorial a little bit more difficult than the previous one due to needing to make decisions on where I should weight each joint to. But I believe that this was a good exercise for me to practise being more decisive and really understand how to paint weights.

I have now started to create a mouth rig for Jet Pack Jones. This tutorial was fairly straightforward, however I feel that I need to make a note of how to name each component in the outliner when it comes to modelling and rigging my own characters. I'm sure with more practise I will get it in no time.

As with the previous tutorial, I had an issue with the mesh unbinding from the skeleton rig, but after stopping and repeating the tutorial more carefully, this was soon resolved. It was a little tricky when it came to connecting the controls but I think I did a good job. I will now move on to creating a flexible mouth rig.

In this Jet Pack Jones tutorial, I have now added extra joints to the skeleton for the head and painted in the weights. I had a few hiccups when completing this tutorial because the mesh of the body was unbinding from the skeleton, however, after starting over I realised that it was a small step that I must have skipped over when following along. I will aim to be more cautious when proceeding to the next tutorial.

After spending some time reflecting on my contribution to Toolkit 2, I have to say that my feelings towards this project are a bit mixed. Having rejoined the course back in September after a few years working on my health, I knew that there would be some challenges ahead in terms of readjusting to the workflow and computer programs. I was pleased to find out that my knowledge hadn't completely disappeared, however I did feel at a slight disadvantage because there were still some things that I needed to re-learn. I believe that the Maya tutorials helped with that process immensely, and I feel fortunate to be able to have access to these. On the flip side, however, I do believe I have let myself down in terms of time management, not only in regards to Maya, but also my Character Design project. I will hold myself accountable and not make excuses, because I believe that if I don't start picking up the slack then I will truly fall behind not just in university, but also my future c