Making of "New Penguoen 2.38" 2

The penguin

The penguin has been modelled starting with a cube and extruding faces, the usual polygonal modelling (see "Modelling Bongo" tutorial). Actually I had already modelled it some time before, it was the Pengzilla (modelled just to try the new Blender's softbody feature).

Basically the body had two different materials, the white skin and the dark skin; several procedurals have been used to reach the final appareance. Procedurals are really useful but the more of them you use and, again, the longer are the rendering times. Image textures render faster.

In this case, I baked the procedurals textures with the Other texture Baker script by blenderhead z3r0_d; the script works great but sometimes mirrors in some area the baked procedurals. No problem, a bit of painting in The Gimp and everything got fixed. A damned useful script! Then, more painting to add better details.

Materials are very important too; all the penguin's had Oren-Nayar and Blinn shaders with ramps; the ramps colors matched the color of the sunlight and of the ambient's shadows.
A single Blend procedural mapped on the Nor Map Input (material buttons) provided a fake Sub Surface Scattering effect.

Next steps were the rigging and the skinning of the mesh (I must be honest: I usually do texturing, rigging and skinning almost at the same time. It works better to me).
With the new animation features, the rigging workflow has been tremendously improved; now it is enough to click on the screen to add bones, and by assigning the IK constrain to one of them you can fastly build the IK chain. In just a few minutes, I remade the basic armature for the penguin and then started to add constrains to automate some function.
For example, I assigned two Action constrains to the "back" bone, targeted to the "pelvis" one: as the pelvis rotates on the left or on the right, the back rotates on the opposite direction to balance the position.
Or else, I added bones for the fat, with Locked Track constrains targeted to empties parented to root bones in the armature; the empties had a Slow Parent (in the objects window, F7) of a few frames, to create automated effects of follow through and overlapping for the fatty areas.
I added also bones with Stretch constrains in the legs areas, to simulate a minimum of muscles stretching.
The skinning of the model by creating Vertex Groups (editing window, F9) took more time; by the way, this is a too long issue to be covered here.