Doesn’t it make you want to cuddle with a bassoon? Trying to figure out how to get this little guy to work with armatures. What do you guys think?
I have also attached the original concept art and a “full body” shot. 
Wow looks nice! You could make a really good animation with this character! The reflections do give it a sort of plasticy look but other than that is looks great!
Thanks!
Hmmm … bassoons usually have a pretty glossy finish on them. Or at least mine does. Good comment though: I’ll definitely see if I can make it look like a polished wood, rather than a piece of plastic. (That is, unless someone knows where to download a material that’s like that.)
The problem that I’m having is that I modelled most of the bassoon using cylinders, so it makes really sharp and noticeable breaks in it when I make it bend anywhere. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be having the bassoon bend in the middle anyway!
This(< click) has tons of materials on it. There should be something useful to it for you. Good luck!
And if you haven’t (which you probably do) try putting a subsurf modifier on it. And if it still bends either increase the number, from 2 to about 3 or 4, not too much as that will slow your computer down way to much though. And if anything just add some edge loops around the problem areas so they bend easier. Hope that was clear and good luck!
Yeah, I think that’s where I got the material that it’s using right now. I love that site. 
I do use subsurfs, but yeah, it’s really slow, and you have to turn it up a lot to make it do anything that looks nice. The cylinders (except for the “head”) are just a circle of vertices at the top, connected to a circle of vertices at the bottom, so it takes about a million subsurfs to make it smooth vertical-wise, but then the subsurf also adds a million in-between points around the circumference, and so it slows the whole process down unbearably.
Maybe if I made the tubes out of a cube (more of a parallelepiped, I guess) and applied the subsurf to that … ? I’ll give it a shot. Thanks again! Great suggestions!
Oh, what are “edge loops”? Forgive me, I’ve only been using Blender for a couple weeks now!
Oh it’s fine. I understand. Here (< click) is a page on edge tools In the first image there is a pic of a sphere. The one to the right, with the horizontal edge selected. That is an edge loop. An edge loop will not abruptly stop but will make, sort of, a circle and will never stop.
If you add some more of those to your cylinders (Ctrl + R) that should improve flexibility without adding a ton of geometry. Hope that helps.
i love it!
i play bassoon you’ve captured it’s look quite well
Haha great! I’m a bassoonist too! I think all bassoonists eventually come to anthropomorphise their bassoons this way, even if they don’t admit it.
Dudebot13, Can you repost that link?
Yea sorry about that, got too concerned with the description forgot to put there link in it. Okay, here it is
Thanks! I’ll have a look.
Great stuff!
Thanks! Any suggestions?
I see you have a couple of pans in the fire (bad pun based on your other thread).
I love the ideal of giving the bassoon a face. I never played bassoon but always enjoyed listening to them. (I played Sax and there is only so much brass sound you can take.) One thing that bugs me about the face is the mouth. I assume you meant the value to be it’s mouth. If this is the case, might I suggest adding a suggestion of an upper lip above the value. Something to suggest that the value is his bottom lip, not something covering his mouth. Right now, he appears always to be gagged by the value. Just a thought.
Actually I like that it doesn’t have a mouth. I can imagine him playing instead of speaking during an animation.
About the bending: Make sure that your subsurf is below the armature modifier. This will smooth out rough edges made by the subsurf cage. The places where he should bend should at least have 3 edgeloops close together. Add additional to make the bend smoother. You might also want to look into the meshdeform modifier for this little creature but you need a 2.46 Release Candidate for that.
If you need to turn your subsurf higher then 2 you probably have some seriouse topology issues.
Could you show us the wireframe in ortho front and side and maybe a screenshot of the wires while he bends?
Okay, making some progress. Can any of you guys point me toward some resources on facial expressions? I have just been changing the guy’s face using the “sculpt” tool, but that doesn’t seem like a good long-term solution, and especially not if I ever want to animate him.
For animatable facial expression you need to take a look at shapekeys and their relation to armatures. Or you could go the all armature way which is a lot tougher (me thinks).
See http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Shape_Keys
and http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Character_Animation/Shapes for a tutorial (this is actually part of the Introduction to Character Animation tutorial).