Arianna: Texturing and Rigging touch ups

 In the last month, I have modeled, rigged and textured the robot, which was a fun distraction from Poppy. I have also animated him, so that he goes around in circles behind Poppy. Here's what he looks like:

I then create a balloon rig, so that we could animate it and instance, so as to fill up the sky, which would otherwise look very empty in comparison to the crazy houses and smoke. Initially, I used nHair for the string, but I was worried that it may have made the scene too heavy. So I scrapped the hair system, and I gave the string a simple Ik spline. I also textured the balloons using Ruby's swatches.

This is what the final scene should look like, in terms of balloon placement.

 

I have made four original rigs, with slightly different animations as well as visibility, which have been instanced to fill up the scene at different times. As the animation proceeds, more balloons appear.