December 5 2004
What could possibly look more ridiculous than a grown up man in his early twenties pulling faces at the computer screen, much like the ones seen below?
If anyone caught sight of the inane frowns I’m making here lately, I’d surely be sent to the doctor, if not shut away altogether!
But it’s all for a good cause: Tatsu is now fully setup for animation using Final Rig and the last two days or so were spent creating blendshapes for his facial animation.
Who else but myself could I get to act out these excessively exaggerated mimes?! At times I feel a bit like the infamous Emotion Eric, only that it’s (fortunately) not my mug on display in the end.
Regardless, I’m having huge fun doing this, every once in a while bursting out in laughter at the incredible grimaces Tatsu is capable of doing.
He has quite a broad range of facial expressions, making him able to convey all sorts of different emotions from various states of happiness to the most sinister evilness conceivable. His dominant character trait lies closer to the latter, so that’s where my main focus lies as you can probably tell from the shots above…
November 26 2004
Ok, so I’ll admit it: I’m not a very good character rigger. Sure, I know the basics, but the process of setting up a character for animation just isn’t one of the things I enjoy doing… too much trial and error for my taste.
Setting up Bagel 2 wasn’t much of a challenge and so I got away with a simple system so clumsy it would probably bring tears to the eyes of an experienced rigger… and setting up a dragon is a whole different beast altogether!
But since my main character model, the dragon Tatsu, is almost finished, I was looking for (preferably free!) tools to assist me in rigging the little guy. My quest on CGTalk and HighEnd 3D yielded results fairly quickly — here’s what I’ve been able to dig up, so far:
- Creature Tools
Creature Tools is a free tool new to me, but nonetheless very interesting. The intuitive animation system and some of the other bonus features look useful!
- FinalRig
This one I’ve had the pleasure of using before, and I remember having a lot of fun playing with the “stretchy IK” features, allowing for a very toony style of animation. Seems technically mature and quite stable. A bonus is the out-of-the-box support for a tail (and wings), which could save me a lot of time. Plus, it’s free!
- aniMan
Here’s another free rigging tool, but unfortunately the producer’s site hasn’t been accessible for what seems like forever. The system itself feels solid enough and the feature-set is impressive!
- Character Studio for Maya
This one looks like a Chinese hack to bring 3ds max Character Studio–like features to Maya. Apparently there’s no official homepage or anything of the sort and the whole thing feels a bit flaky… I’m staying away from this one!
- The Setup Machine
The Setup Machine is the first non-free solution I tried. Its features include builtin support for quadrupeds, centaurs (!) and tentacles… nothing I’d particularly require. Still, support for long necks and tails could come in handy. The boxy character controls were a bit lacking, in my opinion.
- AdvancedSkeleton
Animation Studios of Sydney, Australia, offer a trial version of their relatively expensive rigging solution, AdvancedSkeleton. Playing with the evaluation version, I must say that of all the systems I tested, this is the one I liked least. It sports a vast feature-set, but overall it actually felt less sophisticated than some of the free alternatives.
Then of course there are independent products such as Motionbuilder or messiah:animate, which are both out of the question at the moment due to their pricing.
So right now I’m leaning towards FinalRig 1.2, mainly because of the integrated tail and also because I’ve used it in the past and am hence familiar with some of its quirks and their workarounds.
Should you have any other suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them!
November 22 2004
Just yesterday I posted about having to create my models in a much more stylized, cartoony way… so here’s an update on the cart from yesterday’s post:
Looks much better, no? I went ahead a redid the whole thing, this time aiming for a stylized look from the ground up. At first I tried to simply render the old model using toon shaders, however that didn’t turn out satisfactory at all, as there’s much more to the cartoon look than just slapping any ol’ toon shader on whatever model you have.
For a while I had my doubts that 3D cel shading could produce the look I was hoping to achieve, but seeing the result on this cart I now feel confident that the upcoming (more difficult) character models will also turn out fine.
November 21 2004
Various types of fruit will play a major role in Sleeping Dragon, and because they’re easy to model, I started out creating a few:
Here’s a peach, a melon and a strange thing that began as a biwa and ended up the bastard child of a kiwi and a rotten apple. It may be interesting to know that there are no bitmap textures involved like you’d find in any 3D game — the lines on the melon, the subtle peach-fuzz and even the shape of the peach are created using procedural textures. If there’s any interest, I might cook up a little tutorial in the near future.
Another model I’ve done some work on is this cart. It may look pretty nice altogether, but it’ll be no good for my film because it’s far too realistic!
I still have a hard time refraining from making things look too realistic… modern 3D programs tempt you by making it so easy! Anyway, I must remember that I’m making a cartoon movie, so things need to look simple and stylized. The fruits above are at least a step in the right direction…
November 15 2004
Over the weekend my girlfriend Kayo came over from Bonn for a short stay, during which she helped me finalize the story, remove inconsistencies and really get the some life into the characters! We had a good time acting out all the scenes and she seems to enjoy the story as much as I do, which is a good sign since she’s also my harshest critic!
We did some work on the musical score, sorting out styles and tunes that deserve closer consideration. It’s certain that it won’t just be tootling along in the background, far from it! Musical effects will be inserted with much consideration and only to emphasize the activity on screen, taking a cue from the way drums are employed in Japanese Noh theatre.
From a vast heap of ideas we finally chose “Sleeping Dragon” to be an apt title for the film. No, it’s not exactly the most creative or even fancy name possible, but it does suit the story well without giving too much away ahead of time. And think about it: Even Shakespeare and Goethe got away with naming their plays after the main characters!
So now that the story is finalized and I have a little free time in the upcoming weeks, I’ll start modelling the settings and the characters. The environment will be mostly painted anyway, so this should be done pretty soon.
For the few scenes where camera movement is involved, I intend to use an interesting technique called camera mapping, which unfortunately I have little experience with. Expect a post concerning my research on camera mapping soon!
November 8 2004
Painting watercolors is a lot harder than it may look… especially when there’s not a single drop of H2O involved!
Over the week-end I tried to simulate the look of Chinese or Japanese watercolor paintings using good ol’ Fractal Design Painter, with very mixed results. Some of the effects of watercolors can be achieved with relative ease, but others I was simply unable to reproduce. I’m currently downloading the trial version of Corel Painter IX, which supposedly includes a much improved watercolor engine… and perhaps I need to spend on a new graphics tablet, my Graphire 2 being a few years old and lacking newer features such as tilt sensitivity, which should improve my paint-strokes quite a bit.
The backgrounds in my film will be painted mostly in a style inspired by traditional Japanese landscape paintings, so achieving a convincing effect will be essential to the outcome of the final product.
