CT4APP - Legs animation: Legs Modeling

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Production Process

The modeling of the legs was pretty much straightforward. In my first attempt of creating the Shaolin legs I actually modeled every detail, like the straps and wrinkles. 

At first I was very pleased with the looks of it, but then I realized that the mesh is way too complex and the poly count way too high for such a model. There wasn't much that I could do from that point, so instead of trying to clean it up I decided to make another model from scratch.

This time I made sure to use bump maps instead of polygons for adding the details.

I painted the textures mostly in Mudbox but I also used Photoshop for some details. To see how the pants fold I used a reference photo from Google.

Rigging was quite challenging because I added a reverse foot lock. Because my project demanded 3 sets of legs I went through the whole process again. The difference is that the 'smart' dressed legs have another, simpler, kind of rig: 

The kid's legs are in fact just a modified version of the Shaolin legs.