MOM DAY!

That’s right! I have finished rigging the Mom character in my film! And therefore finished rigging ALL OF THE 3D CHARACTERS OF MY FILM!! WAHOOOOO!!!! I’M DONE WITH CHARACTER RIGGING YAAAAYYYYYY

(I hate rigging, in case you couldn’t tell. Although I have improved at it quite a bit since I started working on this film, so hey, every cloud has a silver lining.)

However, making the mother was an interesting challenge. After all, just like how I made the head-models of the Mean Girl’s Friends, I also made the Mom’s head by taking the Hero’s Head and morphing it around until it looked like a different person. And I figured that it should really work this time, since at least the mom is related to the hero, right?

However, the challenge here was taking a male head mesh and transforming it into a female one. And not just that — a female one that’s much older. So while I was doing this, I had to figure out a lot of things — what makes a person look older vs. younger? What makes a person look female vs. male?

Anyway, below is photographic documentation of the 15 deformations I put on the Hero Head mesh to turn it from young-male to adult-female. Also, with each transformation, I included a nicely-rendered version of the head, as well as an in-program screencap of the head showing the lattice deformations I implemented:

FIRST THREE TRANSFORMATIONS (the first head is the original base head):

As you can see, my first prerogative was to make the face longer, the nose longer, and the chin more pointed. All ofthose things make the human face look older.

NEXT FOUR DEFORMATIONS:

What I then did was work in more elderly-looking cheekbones (aka more defined ones), I worked with elongating the face more, and I also did a hair-test to see how it looked…….. and it looked like the Main Character in drag. Bad drag. So I knew I still had a ways to go.

NEXT FOUR DEFORMATIONS:

At this point, I saw that it was starting to look more female, so I created a new Skin Texture, and I also think this was the point when I manually moved some of the vertices around the Eyelids to make them more “feline,” if you will. Really all that means is I pulled them up the face, and towards the sides. After all, this is just basic Drag Science — you always brush makeup up and outwards from the center of the face, never down. It makes you look more feminine — true fact!

LAST FOUR DEFORMATIONS:

And here I think I was just doing final touches, getting everything shaped nicely. Aaand that was that!

So yea. And as for making the body, that was simple, because making body meshes is kind of easy.  Haha, I admittedly am not giving nearly as much attention to the body meshes as I am the face meshes…

Now, before I finish this post, let me say that as for the design of the mom character, I admittedly didn’t put much thought into it. After all, this was mainly because I already had the perfect reference to base my character design off of!

Yep — that’s my mom! I even gave the Mom 3D model a shirt that my own real mother actually owns/wears (in the picture on the right). My mom is the best mom I know, so why not base my mom-character off of her? 🙂

Also, I think it’s awesome that my mother character has a nice big dark mane of hair like this. After all, most moms in popular culture NEVER look like that!

That is, unless they’re evil mothers…

…I’m not gonna lie, when I watched Tangled with my family last summer, all of us (and especially my mom) couldn’t help but feel slightly offended at the portrayal of Mother Gothel as a very obviously Jewish/Middle-Eastern-looking woman. Which, I mean, Jews/Arabs have always been the face of evil in pop culture, let’s face it. (Go back to some Original Series Star Trek episodes, look at the way the Klingons used to look, and try to deny that they totally looked like stereotypical portrayals of Arabs.) So with all of this, I guess I’m trying to do some community service with my thesis film as well. After all, Jew girls can be nice, too! Dark curly hair and all. 🙂

Alright, sorry to get superficially pseudo-political there. Have a good week y’all!

More to come.

I’m A Nerd, (But An Artsy One At Least)

 

This is a pose I just did for the rough-pass of the shot when the Mean Girl says “Oh I’m SOOO Sorry! I didn’t mean to do that!”

 

 

…And this is me being a total dork. But this makes me think that I should recreate the full Birth Of Venus painting using the Mean Girl as Venus and her three friends as the 2 winds and the chick holding the cloth! Admit it, that would be hilarious.

 

Anyways, Happy Monday!

 

More to come!

Two Images For Thanksgiving

The first one is stupid so I’ll get that one out of the way:

 

 

…yea. Sorry I’m a dork. Also sorry I didn’t put any effort into making this image not-creepy. Hopefully you don’t have nightmares tonight after seeing this.

 

Anyway, hopefully this second image will help make you happier:

 

This is me working from video reference! Woooo. Hmm and now that I look at it I realize she needs to bend her neck more to hit that pose. But yea! I thought this image was funny seeing me acting and then seeing this character making the same pose. Also yes that is my desk I’m sitting on. (I needed something to sit on so that my feet weren’t touching the ground.)

 

Anyway, yea! Just workin’. And Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!

 

More to come. 🙂

How To Set Up A Shot With Missing Characters

So a while back (way before I had even started creating the Mean Girls’ Friends) I created stand-in versions of all of my Maya Scene Files so that I could just get that shit out of the way ASAP. But now that I have all my 3D Characters pretty much ready, I can finally PUT those characters into use! So I figured it’d be cute if I did a before/after shot.

Before inserting all the characters:

I used gray cubes. Because it works.

But now that I have the Mean Girls’ friends ready to go…

It’s Lights Camera Action! Except really just Camera and Action. Lights will come later. YES I KNOW THIS SHOT IS BLOWN OUT, I’LL FIGURE OUT LIGHTING LATER.

But yea. Oh and LOL I just noticed that Edgar’s feet are falling through the roof of the play structure. Haha! Luckily this play structure is just a stand-in as well. Ha ha!

More to come.

As I Animate And Stuff

Like I said, all there is to do right now is finish my location models and do the damned animation for my film.

 

So first off, here’s the latest animatic with a couple more scenes animated (but everything’s at the utmost-roughest state of animation, so–)

 

 

And here are some images of the models I’ve been working on!

 

 

I’ve actually made texturing the Exterior of the Monster House my final project for my Lighting and Rendering class, which is great because A) it’ll force me to get that done, B) texturing this model is sure to be difficult due to how complex it is, and C) getting the texturing on this done correctly will be a HUGE help for my film, since making the Monster House look right and scary/the way the Monster House looks is a very important pivotal element of the film.

 

Also, here’s a close-up on some grunge I attempted with the golden grown above the central window:

 

…Yea, it all still needs work. But it definitely looks better than the colors I’d put on it before!

 

Also, my fabulous and super-talented visual designer friend, Theo Aretos, got some designs to me for the Monster Party Room! Here are the 2 paintings he did for it. One is more of a color-study and the other is a diagram-version of the central party area.

 

 

We met up this past Saturday at CTNX, though, and we both discussed/agreed that it needed an entrance-way appended to it so that there would be a better opportunity for camera angles showing the grandiose-ness of the party area.

 

Anyway, here is the progress I have so far on the Party Room:

 

Just the central cylindrical area (cut-out version):

 

Interior shot (with poor lighting) of the central area, including the appended entrance area:

 

So yea! Imagine that area full of crazy lights and shit. Also, it seems like the Disco Ball is working better than I anticipated as well! Hey heyyyy.

 

So yea. Just chuggin’ along.

 

More to come!

Light, Camera…

…ACTING.

 

Yes, I have finally really hit the point in the production of my film where all there is to do is to ANIMATE. But of course there were a few roadblocks left I had to overcome today before I could start.

 

1) I needed to edit together the best takes of the reference I shot of all the Dialogue. (And I still need to shoot some more reference, but I’ve done the bulk of it today and yesterday)

2) I also needed to import Archer, Bil, and Edgar (the mean girl’s three friends) into one of the shots so I can start animating it!

 

But alas, I encountered a minor issue with that — Having 6 rigs in one Maya file will cause your computer to SLOW. DOWN. Like a MOTHERFUCKER. To the point where it’s just not workable anymore. And when I encountered this, at first I was like “shit shit shit shit shit” because I got a film to animate, man!!! But this problem turned out to have a really simple solution: Layers! Basically, the visibility of each character has its own layer, and when I’m animating a character or two characters interacting with each other, I only turn those layers on. The rest can just stand there invisibly, haha.

 

And with that said, I now have my first shot set up and ready to animate (it’s the scene when the Mean Girl gets the Hero’s ball, kicks it over the wall, and the Mean Girl’s friend tells the Hero that he “ain’t getting that ball back”), and it’s SOOOOO EXCITINGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111111111

 

But that took pretty much all day today to set up and figure out. For now, though, I leave you with a pretty render of the Mean Girl and her posse of cool friends.

 

 

Gnight y’all! And of course, More to come.

Quickie Whatever Post

Here’s just an update on where I’m at on things.

 

1) I modeled the Hero’s Mom FINALLY!!! I won’t show it for a couple more days though because I feel like that deserves its own post. But I’ve gotten a really great first pass on the head/hair/body of the Mom character, and it’s actually looking really good… right now I’m just trying to come up with last changes to do to it but to be honest I’m not totally sure if I want to do much with it at all.

 

 

 

…Oh, OK fine here’s a render of what she looks like:

 

Notice how her hairline lifts from her forehead a bit there. Yea, I still need to fix a few things…

 

2)  I have FINISHED editing together the dialogue audio!!! What that means is that all the lines in my film that involve characters saying actual sentences, I now have final versions of those lines. Aaand I’m really happy with them! The audio for things like Gasps or Pantings or Screaming, though, I haven’t gotten final versions edited together of. But whatever. The dialogue is the more important stuff, I would say, haha.

 

3) I’m currently putting together the 7th version of my Animatic, which will include this finalized audio, and once it’s done, I’ll throw it up on this blog. So stay tuned, Phantoms! It gets brighter and brighter all the time. 😉

 

More to come.

Concept Art and Modelling and Stuff!

So my friend/former-fellow-Dreamworks-Intern, Theo Aretos, agreed a while back to do concept paintings for my thesis film! Which is GREAT because I fucking SUCK at designing things. (and yet I took on the challenge of designing my own characters, but whatever, what’s done is done)

 

Anyway, he has so far gotten 2 paintings done: The exterior of the Monster Mansion, and the initial Hallway inside the Monster Mansion that the Hero enters before stumbling upon the party room:

 

And to be quite honest, I am absolutely swept away by these paintings. They’re exactly what I asked for, too — Not super-finished, sketchy paintings that get the shapes and colors down, but don’t bother too much with the detail. So before you get all concerned, I purposefully asked him to keep the paintings sketchy. Because that way, it gives me more freedom when I model these structures into real life! And really, the important thing that these paintings give me is style  and color composition, which are the two things that I am the absolute WORST at when it comes to film-making. So thank you so much Theo!! And I can’t wait to see the rest of the paintings! (That’s right y’all, he’s designing the School Yard, Kid’s Room, Kid’s House, and Party Room as well! And he described his idea for the Party Room recently and I pretty much died with how awesome it sounds, so YEAH BABY shit is getting DONE.

 

Anyway, and just in case you’re concerned about whether or not I’ll be able to model these paintings into real-life 3D models, worry no further!

 

These are 2 production shots of the exterior of the Monster Mansion. It’s not finished, as you can obviously tell, but already it’s looking pretty fancy, in my opinion! I really only need to append another handful of structures and fix some of the sizes before it’s time to start texturing and lighting it! Wooooo.

 

BUT IN OTHER NEWS~

 

I have officially gotten my entire cast-list for voice actors for my film! YESSIREEE! And without further adieu, I give you the list (In order of appearance):

 

Hero: Jesse Pilchen

Hero’s Mom: Celia Rivera-Baron

Mean Girl: Christina Cook

Mean Girl’s Friends (Archer, Bil, and Edgar): Michael Malconian

The Party Monsters: Whichever of my Fraternity Brothers feel like going into a recording booth (none of the party ghosts have any real lines, so it’s not a big deal)

Main Party Ghost: Me!

 

Yes, I’m doing one of the voices. After watching my Animatic through all its stages, I’ve realized that, while I can’t really pull off a middle-shool-boy voice, and CERTAINLY not a middle-school-girl voice, I definitely CAN pull off a goofy Ghost voice. The rest of the actors, however, are other USC students, and I’m SUPER excited to record them! I’ve been struggling to lock down a date with the ADR people, though, but with luck, it’ll happen this coming Wednesday (yes, on Halloween. I’m aware of how perfect that is.).

 

ANYWAY, ONE LAST BIT OF NEWS~

 

I’ve officially decided on which 2D animation software I’m going to use for my film! This was a point of concern because I really don’t like Flash or Toon Boom, because they both function in Vector-Based lines, which quite frankly look like shit in my opinion. They just don’t look like the lines that I draw on paper, whereas animation software that works in Bitmap Lines end up producing work that looks WAY better. It requires more work, but I know that it will pay off in the end. Also, I’m considering having the party monsters be colorless (just filled in with white) both for simplicity’s sake and for style. After all, juxtaposing a full-color world with 2D black-and-white monsters will be… quite jarring, won’t it? 😉

 

Anyway, after shopping around for free (or very cheap) animation software, I found that the best match for me was PAP, or “Plastic Animation Paper,” which is a really fucking fantastic free program that can import footage, animate bitmap-cels on top of it, and it exports that animation really beautifully.

 

I only got this program a couple days ago (and I’ve been partying this past weekend due to Halloween) so I only have a very rough sketch-up of the first bit of 2D Animation I’m doing for the film:

 

 

…and even that rough sketch of the animation isn’t done. I did all of that today though (including figuring out how the goddamned program works, which took time in of itself) so as you can see it’s a fast, lightweight program that, if I put the effort into it, will produce good product. So yay!

 

Oh, and P.S. to those non-animation peeps reading this, the difference between Bitmap Lines and Vector Lines is such: Bitmap Lines are based on pixels, and when you scale them up in size they lose quality. Vector Lines are based on mathematical points in space, and when you scale them up, the points get scaled up, and the computer just fills in based on the new numerical location of those points. So as a result, they lose no quality when they’re resized. However, Vector Lines (because they’re so geometric in nature) don’t look nearly as natural as Bitmap Lines… it’s sort of like the difference between buying a cake from the store and making it yourself. Although the quality isn’t necessarily as perfect as the store-bought cake, there’s more heart in the home-made one.

 

Anyway, that’s all for now! Hopefully this is enough progress to show to my class tomorrow (it’s my group’s turn to present and I’m kind of nervous because I spent 2 of the last 3 weekends either partying or going to NorCal, soooooooooo yea I didn’t actually make that much progress in the last 21 days, gulp) but yea.

 

More to come!

MEAN GIRL FRIENDS MAKEOVER!!!

Hey, remember those 4 kids I designed to be the Mean Girls’ posse? They have been hardcore revamped based off of comments I got from people I showed them to. And I gotta say, they are looking MUUUCHHHH better. Check it out:

ARCHER (old)

Archer was my favorite of the 4, but he still needed some fixing. His shirt was too informal, and he almost looked too stylish. (One fellow student of mine, Sullivan Brown, made the really apt observation that all of the kids in this posse were looking too stylish, and that kids in Middle School who are trying to be stylish will only ever hit the nail 60 or 70% on the head, unless they’re the son or daughter of a famous person)

ARCHER (new)

And as you can see, I didn’t actually change that much with Archer. I tidied up his shirt a bit, and shortened/rounded out his head (which is actually something I did to all of them).

BIL (old)

Yes, Bil really is only spelled with one L like that. Because I said so. Anyway, as you can see, Bil was looking preeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetty homosexual and just flat-out weird when I first birthed him.

BIL (new)

But now he’s gone from ‘Mo to ‘Bro! Bro who plays basketball, that is. (You can’t really see it in this photo of him, but the sides of his jersey are blue. How American!) And just like Archer, I also rounded out/shortened Bil’s head.

CASSIDY (old)

Cassidy was my least favorite. Ugly hair, boring clothes, and he looked like a bizarre 40 year old man.

CASSIDY (new)

…And to be honest, I’m still really not impressed with how he’s turning out. He looks much younger here, his hair is slightly better, his clothing’s ok, but really, I don’t feel like he’d fit in with the Mean Girl. She’s too pretty and stylish, and this is just a mess (and his face, ugh).

EDGAR (old)

I kind of know why this happened, but it still surprised me when literally my entire animation class burst into laughter when they saw this guy. But I guess it makes sense — his shirt is unbuttoned down to his bellybutton, and those suspenders, and THAT HAT. It’s all kind of ridiculous. And by “kind of” I mean very.

EDGAR (new)

I like this Edgar MUCH more though. He’s cute, he’s skinny and tall (which is ok for a Middle School boy I guess), and the hat is, needless to say, much better.

Here’s a better look at the hat, btw:

Anyway, I may change the colors of his clothes a bit, and I need to fix his face some, but I like where he’s going otherwise.

Anyway, with that said, I must make an ~important announcement~:

I WANT TO GET RID OF CASSIDY

Shocking, I know. But he’s really just kind of an unfixable mess at this point, and I also realize that reducing the number of kids in the Mean Girls’ posse from 4 to 3 will be very smart for several reasons:

1) Less to animate

2) People will still get the point that she has a group of guys that follows her around

3) All great evil things come in threes! Like Cerberus in Harry Potter, or Draco Malfoy and his two friends! Oops, those were both Harry Potter references. Whatever. Anyway, all bad things come in threes, and so I feel like this makes more sense.

So yea, meet your new friends, Mean Girl! Archer, Bil, and Edgar. They’re not totally done yet, but they’s each at least 80 percent there, I’d say. Woohoo!

More to come

On The Verge

Hey!

So I’m on the verge of getting many things done. Let me list the ways!

– I’m finally getting on the ball and will (*fingers crossed*) hopefully have completed some voice-actor auditions by the end of this coming week. I still need to lock down the room though so that’s in the air.

– In order to avoid becoming super fucking lazy, I went ahead and started up the Scene-Files for 14 of the 30 Scene-Files that will comprise my film. (Before today I had only started up 4). Now, I haven’t actually animated in any of the new ones, but just the fact that they’re set up now means I don’t have to get over the mental-block/procrastination-fodder of  “I don’t wanna have to set up the shoooottttt” anymore, because it’s already all set up. Time to animate!

– Speaking of animation, I’ve gotten 2 shots ready to show to people who I trust to give me good advice on how to improve it. And so that process shall begin like, 30 minutes from now!

– I got a message from my OTIS student friend, Theo Aretos (who I also interned with at Dreamworks) recently saying that he’s almost done with the concept designs for the environments for my film. So soon I won’t have ridiculously-crappy-looking standin-environments for my film! Wooooohooo!!

– I heavily revamped the 4 friends of the Mean Girl of my film (and by this I mean I changed their bodies) and all that leaves is fixing their faces some, and then I’ll have a second pass on them to show around to people! Woohoo.

So basically, there’s a lot of potential in the air. Will I persevere and continue to make progress? Or will I just open up a bag of Doritos and never finish my film?

Just kidding, of course I’ll persevere. PERSEVEERREE!!! (I really need to stop making these posts after 2AM)

But in the mean time, here’s at little something I did for homework for another class:

You’re probably wondering what the fuck this is. This is my homework for my Lighting And Rendering class, and we had to demonstrate Caustics (aka when light is refracted through transparent objects like water or crystals) and Subsurface Scattering (which is used to make skin look real). So I figured, what the hell, I’ll put the Mean Girl from my film into a sassy pose and turn her into an ice sculpture and a skin… sculpture… thing. She kind of looks more like water in the ice sculpture one though, and she looks a little waxy in the skin one. But whatever. I’m not trying to be a surfacer…

More to come!