Salty Pose

Side view

Front

Persp

Top

After binding the joints to the skin, putting Salty in a pose was just a simple act of rotating specific joints. Salty is a friendly seal.

Salty Joints

Front of Salty

His side

Perspective

From the top

Figuring out how to render the joints was even harder than making the joints themselves. I ended up using print screen with the project open in maya and cropped the pictures. The most complicated part of using the joints was setting up the hierarchy correctly, so that certain joints only affect the desired other joints.

Salty Model

Side view

Perspective

Front view

Top view

Salty is the first project that's been actually difficult to model. It's different working with NURBS surfaces instead of polygons, but it's not completely dreadful. Getting the body to look semi-normal was pretty dreadful though, as I don't encounter seals very often in my day-to-day life to understand the body structure.

Inverse Kinetics

Whoooo for Inverse Kinetics! Simple to follow instructions, hard to understand why it all works. Excited to continue learning this and move towards character animations!