Today I created my sword to add to my characters island, I really enjoyed doing this as I didn't expect to be able to create such a nice looking weapon. First I made my side and front view designs in Flash then I began creating the object in 3D in Maya. It took quite a long time to do but I am very happy with the results, when I made this weapon I think I may have sub divided it too many times, but I really wanted the curves to have a good quality and not a block look, I settled on the high quality and high poly count because I for a movie and not a game its not too big of a problem. However is this object was to be a live item in a game I would definitely undo the last two subdivisions to half its poly count and make it lightweight. Once I had the object complete in Maya it had a really evil feel to it so I decided to change the color scheme of my design slightly and make it all metal with a dark metal handle rather than wooden. Below are some screen shots of my work in progress.

 Flash designs.

Maya production

And there is my final complete quality sword.

Today I worked through the animation challenge, I had some Maya version difference difficulties but was pretty simple. I created my own objects as I could not open the file ones, they are pretty much the same.

Here is a video of my final animation.

Today I began creating a rig for my character to do this I am following a series of Youtube tutorials starting with: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDebgY3N724

Although these tutorials are titled "Basic", as they progress they get very complicated, I was also surprised to see how similar different versions of Maya are as all the steps in this tutorial are almost identical to my different version, which is handy. So far I have made some bones, controllers and handles for the bones. I need to progress further in to more tutorials before I find how to link these bones to my character. Here are some pictures of my progression.

Today I first improved the quality of my character, I did this by smoothing the body section of him because I was very happy with my polygon count and as my production is for a movie instead of a game I decided the improved quality would be worth the increased poly count.

Character before smooth.

Character after smooth, if my character was being created as a game character rather than a movie I would have found the specific areas of the model that require more detail and manually split each of the polygons around these areas to improve the quality. However as my character is now at the quality I want him at, I decided it was fine to do a smooth in order to curve of the low quality edges.

After I had done this I began to create the ground for my character to stand on, this was a simple matter of creating a polygon cylinder, then deleting the extra faces so I was left with a circular plane and then raising the middle vertex with the soft selection tool switched on. This gave me a perfectly symmetrical island for my character to stand on.

I then followed a tutorial online in order to create a realistic grass texture to add to the shape.

I created this texture in Photoshop using the following tutorial as guidance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG74ksdmQkI

It was a very nice tutorial with a fast and effective result. Once I had my complete texture I then applied it to my model and remade the UV map for it, in order to even out the scale of each section of grass. I then scaled the entire UV map until I was happy with the size of the grass.

The only modeling left for me to do now is to create a sword and then stab it in to the grass next to my character, I will then texture the weapon and my characters teeth. Once all the modeling and texturing is complete I will begin rigging and animation.