What is a story, without a good villain? We needed to have one of those, otherwise we’d only have a spooky alley and a brothel, which with minimal effort you could find anywhere.

From very early on I knew that I wouldn’t be able to rig a full character. It’s just one of those things I’m not fully ready for (and still am not).

I planned out the plague doctor’s rig like so:

The rig, rudimentary as it was, allowed the plague doctor to bob up and down in a reasonable fascimile of walking while keeping thee amount of moving mesh to a minimum. This didn’t work out so well, nor did the nCloth theory, which was handled by our sadly departed member Anna. She also was to handle the modelling, but unfortunately she moved on before she could complete it. The slack was picked up by Sandra, though I had a hand in the final model (I had to remodel quite a bit of it before it was usable as a base mesh)

The final rig used a combination of Blend Shapes, clusters, bones and an IK system for the leg and arms (though when I animated it, I turned off the IK. I hate IK!). I tried to keep the mesh and rig as clean as possible. Unwise re-UVing later on (by another member of the group) ruined this somewhat.

When it came to texturing, I didn’t want to do it, since I wanted to focus on getting the animation done. Unfortunately, I still had to do it. I created a texture plan for my group to follow when texturing Dr. Sniffles. However, this proved fruitless, so I did it myself.

Here is my texture plan:

For the plague doctor’s clothing, I decided on a simple procedural velvet shader, overlaid with self illuminated bloodstains. This would allow for maximum form even if the lighting didn’t come out right. This technique is very popular on low end gaming consoles such as the Wii as it allows you to fake real lighting with a shader. I like the velvet shader.

Naturally, coming from my background, everything I do looks like it belongs in a videogame, and not a fancy 3D film. What am I even doing.