Here is the progress of my bump map which I decided to include in order to aid the quality of my grass texture.

First I followed a tutorial in order to find out how to create a bump map image using Photoshop. Here is the bump map I produced.

Then I followed another tutorial in order to learn how to apply bump maps to textures and how to edit and adjust them to look as good as possible. Here are some screenshots of me applying and adjusting my bump map until I was happy with the result.

At first the bump was a bit to strong and didn't look much like grass so I played around with a few settings and make it more realistic.

Here is my final grass bump map, and here are some links to the tutorials I followed.

Photoshop Bump Map Tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY6OH_o8krw

Maya Bump Map Settings Tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkAITCwumns

Some work I plan to do in upcoming weeks are:

Bump Map Grass - This will improve my current grass sphere.
Remake Avatar    - I will make a new and more basic avatar to use for my first task.
Rig Weights         - This will help when it comes to animating my complex character.
Ncloth                  - I need to make sure my Ncloth works and can be animated.
Animate               - I will create an animation for my complex character.
Background         - I will move my grass sphere to my basic character and redo a better background for the complex character.

Today I restarted my character rig because the original rigging tutorials I was following where not the best and I found some much better tutorials. I instead followed a 6 part tutorial made by Russel Stasiuk on Youtube starting with : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwNDoyZbsCQ

These tutorials are better because you are given more warning about the future effects of modeling decisions, I didn't notice any mistakes, its clear to follow and a less annoying voice. Here are some screenshots of my rigging production.

Firstly I found out that having a bend in my models knees was a big mistake as this can lead to unusal results when creating IK handles, so I went back to my legs and begin to straighten them out by selecting rings of vertices and using the soft select tool to keep it smooth.

I then moved on creating more bones for my whole character since my arms where down I just made the rig above it and will move them together in position once the control's are complete.

Here is my complete bone structure.

Once my structure was complete I check the orientation of all my joints and begin to adjust them, so they all matched up correctly.

I then created some foot controls, I also added an attribute to these controls allowing me to move the foot, I can use this for future walking or running animations if I ever need them.

Then I created some knee control's using Pole Vectors, I then edited these controls so they will not show up in renders, and only display the necessary attributes.

I then made the hip controls and connected it to the relevant bones so they all move and rotate together correctly.

Next I made a back control using multiple tools such as spline clusters, additional attributes, connection editor, key drivers and much more.

Then I created a head controller using all the same technical shizzle wizzle, and began to make some arm controllers.

Here is an image my final rig all finished I also added a rig to the eyes and added my head mesh as a child of the bones so it is animated correctly, the arms and hands are also rigged up and the hands have newly made attributes that allow me to make a fist shape using a single attribute, this will be helpful for gripping the sword if I decide to do any animations like that, I had to use multiple scrips that I learned from the tutorial videos in order to produce these attributes and do other handy functions in Maya.

I also decided to use a different tutorial for the eyes, I used it because it seemed easier for my unique type of eyes, below is a link to the eye controller tutorial I used.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdZl6tLjfdE

The next thing I need to do is either move the arms rig to line up with the mesh arms or the other way around and then bind my skin to my bones and hope it doesn't go crazy.

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.