The Last Few Days: Schoolyard!

The Schoolyard is where a lot of stuff happens in my film, and it’s also the most object-heavy of any of my locations. Also, it’s an exterior, which posed a whole other set of problems, such as making sure that you can’t see the edge of the ground-plane in any horizon shots while also making it not look like there’s absolutely nothing in the world around the Schoolyard area. Anyway, all I can say, really, is thank god for Trees!

So let me start from concept all the way to the so-far finalized status!

My work was cut out for me when my amazing and talented concept artist, Theo Aretos, did concept paintings for the Schoolyard environment:

This painting was done just to get the color scheme down, and at first I found it interesting considering how dry it felt, but then I realized that that’s actually a smart choice, since I want the schoolyard to feel like a sort of unwelcoming place. Also, this entire time I imagined the ground being covered in grass (because at the end of the day, I am a very very uncreative person when it comes to visual design…), so the idea of having it be a DIRT ground was simultaneously new to me, interesting, better than my original idea, AND it’ll make rendering easier (because fuck if I know how I was gonna render an entire field of grass!)

I then asked him to change up the design of the school-building and to also do a few more playstructure designs, as well as a topographical layout of the ground, and I then got these beauties:

And so my work began. First off, I started by modelling all the things I knew I needed: a picket fence, a stone wall, the school building, and whatever else I could think of in the way of playstructures to fill the area. Check them all out!

Picket Fence! (this was real easy to do, just a lotta copy and paste)

Brick Wall!

(To make the bricks seem authentic, I made a brick-randomizer thingimajigger that basically had clusters attached to 42 different points on a lattice surrounding a base brick shape, and over time those clusters all were programmed to jiggle around in 3D space. As a result, it made… a bit of a difference.)

Monkey Bars!

You can’t really see it from this angle, but this structure was meant to look extra terrifying because the bars go up and down very sharply over the length of the structure.

Sandbox!

Complete with sandcastle, shovel, and bucket. 🙂

Basketball Thingy!

I legitimately forget what it’s called.

You like the hoop, though? Yea, that was fun to make. 🙂

Play Structure Thingy!

This is actually the only play structure that will actually be USED in the story in an at-all important way (it’s what the Mean Girl Gang sits on as they watch the hero enter the monster mansion) and I ended up using the same model as what I’ve been using before since it looked good enough to begin with. I just wonked it up a bit to make it less perfectly straight and symmetrical, I got rid of the swing-set next to it, and later I plan on texturing it so that it looks like it’s actually made of wood and not perfect 3D cubes. (I also plan on texturing everything else in the play yard, but that goes without saying I guess)

Terrifying Slide!!

True story: my dad walked into my room at one point over break and saw me modelling this, and he said “You know, slides aren’t supposed to go up …” Anyway, my point in bringing that up is that the physical nature of these objects are not meant to serve their function, but rather serve the overall stylistic purpose of the play-yard, which is to be a sort of intimidating, terrifying place… but not in a super overt way. Really, though, this is the most overtly creepy thing in the entire schoolyard, I think.

Aaand of course, THE SCHOOL

With a little flag on top~


So yea! Once I modelled all these things, I then had to choose one more thing: TREES.

Luckily, Maya comes with a collection of built-in tree types that you can just paint into your scene, so I went through all of them and went with these Birches:

Cute, non? Also I looked up Birches and apparently they’re wide-spread all over the Northern Hemisphere in temperate climates, and it’s the national tree of like 3 different countries I think…. so I guess I did a good job of making my film be location-ambiguous!

Anyway, once that was all decided upon, it was time to painstakingly put all this shit together. Why painstakingly? Because this is a lot of memory for my computer to handle. But thank god for Layers in Maya, so I can turn on and off objects to make the program’s running speed faster! Woo.

And there ya go. Oh, and if you need further explanation of what will happen where in my film, here you go too:

Bam~

Oh and one last thing about the schoolyard — if you’re concerned that some of the play structure objects seem a bit low-res, then let me defend myself with two rationales behind the relatively short amount of time I spent on modelling everything (this entire thing was put together over the course of like 3 or 4 days):

1) A lot of this shit is going to be waaay in the background, with the exception of the play structure that the mean girl gang sits on

2) I don’t have much time left so I gotta cut corners somewhere…

So yea. Hope this was interesting to read! And as always, there is certainly more to come. 🙂

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.

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!

Tedium

This is me right now:

 

Because I’m wavering between constantly wanting to just pass out (and by that I mean watch endless youtube videos), and getting myself to keep working, which is hard when the work I need to do right now can be summed up in this image:

 

 

Those are audio files! Each with unique and descriptive filenames! See, one really great thing about my Sound Technician (whose name was Kim Patrick, and she is AWESOME) was that the audio files she gave me came ALREADY CUT UP more or less into their individual takes! Which will make putting them into after effects/selecting the best takes REALLY EASY.

 

But that doesn’t change the fact that I still have to name them all according to what lines/sounds are in each of them before I can work on them. Because… yea. That’s how I work. I can’t stare at a folder full of files called “Mean Girl_1.wav, Mean Girl_2.wav, Mean_girl_3.wav” and not end up sobbing quietly to myself 5 minutes later.

 

So that’s been fun (not really)

 

In other news, I’m rigging the Mean Girls’ friends! Evidence of that is the first image of this post. Ehh? ehhhh? See what I did there?

 

Also, check it out, the monster house has color! Or at least its’ starting to:

 

 

The colors fucking suck, I know. I just kinda applied them based on what seemed right at the time, and NOT based on the painting that Theo gave me, so I’ll take a closer look at that soon and get it crackin’. Luckily, I’m learning about surfacing techniques in my Lighting And Rendering class, so in a few weeks I’ll certainly have a much better idea of how to make this house look old and creepy with just the click of a button! Woohoo!

 

But yea. I’m just chuggin’ along as usual. Once I get my sound organized/put into the animatic, I’ll be doing some serious RLO animatin’ though, so stay tuned for that. Yeaaahhh buddy!

 

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!

Mean Girl Day!

I titled this post “Mean Girl Day” because today was ALL about the Mean Girl in my film! And by that, I mean, SHE IS RIGGED! And I now officially have 2 rigged characters in my film. Which is also super great because when you combine the Hero and the Mean Girl in my film, they do about 90 percent of all the 3D-Animated acting of the film. Because after all, the Mean Girls’ friends (of which I plan to have 4 or 5) collectively have 1 line of dialogue (one of them asks the mean girl a question and that’s about it), and the Mother appears in like 2 shots. So, yea.

But in my process of making the Mean Girl the wonderfully beautiful bitch that she is, I took a lot of screencaps, and I wanted to share with you, dear reader, my journey in creating her. And to be honest, my reason for devoting a post like this to her is because her character design really is the greatest I’ve ever done for any character I’ve ever designed — I’m extremely proud of her, and she continues to support my theory that VILLIANS ARE ALWAYS THE BEST CHARACTERS, design or personality-wise. I’ve always fucking loved villains, whether it be the Borg from Star Trek, or Madame Medusa from The Rescuers, or Madame Dubois from Madagascar 3 — Villains are just always amazing.

So here you go:

As all character designs must, the Mean Girl started off as a drawing.

Once I had decided that I liked her having big cat-like eyes, large eye-lashes, a small nose, pouty lips, and a heart-shaped face, I went and sculpted her out in Sculptris, a free 3D sculpting program. And as you can see, this image is NOTHING like what she ended up looking like, and she certainly had some weird fucking beginnings.

But as I worked into her more, things improved, and as I’ve already shown in older posts, I used this hi-res mesh as direct reference to make a Quadrilateral Polygonal model that would become her final face.

Thankfully, I had the sense to soften her brow ridge though, because it was way too fucking intense.

(New head on the right)

And then I had to decide what kind of hair she’d have! I knew I couldn’t have that long voluptuous hair, because it would be impossible to animate. I went with a short ‘do with a large swooping bang, but I knew it needed an accessory to make her more unique looking.

At first I wanted to give her a cute, youthful, girly hairband with fake plastic flowers in it. But then my friend said “No, give her a bow like Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl!” and I was all “Who’s Blair Waldorf?”

But I then looked her up, saw how awesome the bow was, and went with that instead.

I mean duh. The bow is way better.

It became clear at this point, though, that I was NEVER going to escape the Jimmy Neutron comparisons with this film, because not only do people see my main character and think he looks like Jimmy, but now people will look at my villain and think she looks like Cindy!

But really, I like to think of my Mean Girl as a mix between Cindy and Blair Waldorf….

So it’s sort of like a more bitchy, more mature, more stylish version of Cindy. So ha, take that!

But then I had to give her clothing. At first I was going to give her a long-sleeved shirt with a deep v-neck and some blue skinny-jeans. But then I realized that that wasn’t bitchy enough. (And I also consulted some actual females about what middle-school girls wear, and they all seemed to agree on one look:)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand yea! And then I rigged her, and now here you have it! A mean girl.

And before anyone goes ape-shit about the colors, let me say that THESE ARE NOT THE FINAL COLORS. Of anything, really. I mean the final version will probably be like this, but nothing is certain. Her clothing colors will most certainly change, and her lip-stick will become a lighter pink, and her rouge will be toned down a lot (because she still looks a little too mature with that makeup) (I won’t tone down the mascara though, because according to my lady-friends, Middle School is when women go Hard As a Motherfucker with the eyeliner and mascara, so there), but this is what her body is gonna be like.

Also, just as an extra fun image, this is a screencap I took while I was weight-painting her head:

Looks like a shitty iPod commercial, right? Hahaaaa.

OK. Anyway, yea. I figured it would be cool to compile the entire history of this character from step Zero to Finished Product, and it’s really exciting to me that I can create an awesome fucking animated character literally just from my imagination. This is definitely an extremely satisfying accomplishment for me, artistically speaking, and it also gives me confidence that in the future if I want to keep making independent animated films, I still can, with zero budget! 🙂

But yea. As usual, though, it’s 3:30AM right now as I post this, and I’m treating this blog like it’s my fucking diary, so I think it’s time for me to turn on my night music and go to sleep. G’night y’all! I can’t wait to animate this girl!

Peace. (and there’s more to come, of course!)

– Max

The Mean Girl (+ General Progress Update)

Hey! Sorry I haven’t been posting lately.

To give you an overview of what’s been going on — I got some critiques on the look of the main character, which resulted in me changing his head, which meant I had to re-rig his character, which kind of all set me back a whole weekends-worth of work-time, but it’s OK because I’d rather have these kinds of setbacks happen now rather than later, haha! I’m pretty positive that the main character’s design and rig are DONE, though, and I can resume animation tomorrow. Woo!

But you know which character’s design I WON’T be having any setbacks with?

That’s right! The mean girl character in my film (no, she doesn’t have a name yet. And neither do any of the characters in my film, for that matter!) is well on her wait to being turned in a real-life animated character! And my god, can you just look at her? She looks so beautiful, so childlike, so evil…

Really though, it’s those arched-and-pointed eyebrows that make her look so bitchy. I still have to make her lipstick a different shade (because she’s still looking a bit hookery) but for the most part this is how it’ll be. I’m currently in progress on designing her hair, but you can get a pretty good gist for what she’ll be like.

Also, check this one out:

Mean-girl Blendshapes!!! I love these kinds of  shots though, because the “Mouth_Open” blendshape always sticks out from the rest.

Also, I haven’t bothered yet to count how many blendshapes there are, but my best guess is somewhere from 80 to 100?

Whatever. All I can say is that I’m very happy that these are the last blendshapes I’ll have to do for this film — that’s right! Because I figured out a way to use the same head-model as my Hero Character for all the other characters of the film (including his own mother, haha!)

But I’ll have a post about that later. Anyway, I predict that by the end of next weekend I’ll have rigged the Mean Girl character. But for this week, I plan on dedicating myself to getting the first shot done and ready to show to people for critiques, because goddammit September’s not even over and I’m already slightly behind on schedule! Shiiiiiiiiiiit.

OK, that’s all for now, though. I really just wanted to post these to prove to you guys that I’m still alive, haha.

More to come!

My Very Own Face Rig!

I first tried using the Advanced Skeleton Maya Scripts from Creative Crash to rig my face, but those failed miserably. So instead, I did what every other independent 3D animator does — rig with Blendshapes!!

 

So first, some images to show all my faces:

 

 

 

And the hilarious thing is that these images are OLD! First of all, there are no eyebrows on the model (I’ve since changed that) and second of all, there’s only 58 heads in the first image — since that one was taken, there now are probably 60 or 70, I’m not really sure.

 

Anyway, to see the face rig in action, watch this little video I threw together!

 

 

And the hilarious thing about THAT video is that THAT video is old too! Because I’ve since updated the Eyebrow deformers and I also made some Mouth-Up, Mouth-Down, etc. deformers like I mention at the end of the video I think…

 

Anyway, yea. It’s looking good! I predict that tomorrow I’ll be shooting reference and animating. But tonight, I’ll celebrate by relaxing a bit.

 

But I may end up working anyway. Haha. We’ll see…….

 

Stay tuned! As always, there’s more to come.