Oldies but Goodies: Part I

I've been trying to find some of my older animations. I have a lot of rotoscoping and converted 16mm films I did in college I've been trying to find.  Artsy fartsy stuff. Some of the ones I've been trying to find are unfortunately, still on film. Others are lost on some buried hard drive.  As I find them, I'll post them.

Some of the ones I DO have, though, are some of my later Emerson creations. I came from a more 2D background, hand-drawn animation and scratching the emulsion off of film. Things like that. I made some charcoal illustrations for a Jaques Prevert poem.  Though the perspective is a little off on some of them, I still like the piece overall.

I hope you enjoyed that. I enjoyed getting my hands dirty over it.

The next semester, my last at Emerson, I got more into 3D. I had taken pretty much all of the classes Emerson offered at the time, so I took the capstone course, where you work on an individual project for the entire semester.  It was like producing a BA Practicum project, only it was in the New Media department. At the time, New Media and 3D was very VERY new at Emerson.

I have an addiction to incorporating tangible art into my projects. I guess it makes me feel like even though there's nothing in the 3D generated world that's actually real, there's still something I can still see as tangible. It gives it more of a feeling of texture to me. I love texture. Charcoal, watercolor paper...hey, even elephant skin. It's something tangible to touch in a totally un-physical realm.

So what did I do? Everything is 3D, but everything is also modeled and textured from an object I physically painted and made. I hand painted all the textured seen.

In terms of the content, the world through a child's eye is an amazing thing. There is innocence, and they (typically) have an idealistic way of seeing things that goes beyond what you see with the naked eye.  Everyday things become extraordinary.  BUT...when children get older and turn into adults they loose that way of looking at the world. And that little tragedy is represented here as a metaphor: a pop-up book. Enjoy.

FINALLY. The "Henry" Rig

I started modeling Henry last summer. It didn't take me too long to actually model him, I used Maya for the actual model and did some fine tuning in ZBrush.

It took me about three months to texture and sculpt the displacement/normal maps.  I was working on several other projects at the time and painted for about 2-3 hours a day for several days per week. Very pain staking but I love the result. I plan on having a nice print of him displayed in the next CDIA gallery showing.

The rigging. Oh, the rigging.  Simple enough, he has a typical IK set-up in the legs, spline set-up with clusters in the spine.  The trunk has preset positions that can be accessed from the main trunk control, very much like a finger control set-up on a bi-ped rig.  The most unique part of the rig is the two hair follicles, one in the belly, one on the tail, that allow that geometry to hang and sad with the body.

The ears are the only thing I would change. I used soft bodies controlled by a series of joint chains throughout the ear.  It was very temperamental, more then other kinds of dynamics, it was time consuming, and I don't think they look as good as they could. Looking back, I would have used nCloth.

As a rig overall, its functional! Take a look:

The many Hairs of my younger self.

The BANE of my existence.

Yeah. Dynamics.

So why the heck do I insist on using them?




I made my 'little girl' character a while back to put in a scene with Henry, the African elephant I made.  I hope to have an entry about specific rigging techniques I used for Henry, but for now...the girls freaking hair.

I wanted to use myself (a much younger self) as a reference.

Everyone say "AAAAAWWWWWWWWWWW".

Okay, whatever. I'm still ginger.  Now when I first made her, I wanted to use hair.  I knew I wanted it short, so I rigged up fur that is controlled by hair particles. I should never have done that.  While it moves and floes more realistically, it was very  hard to control. She looked like a monkey.  Even though I made the geometry of her body a rigid body so it couldnt pass through, it still did, making it look like some kind of Curly thing from the Three Stooges (original please, I'm not touching this 'remake' with a 10-foot pole).  The result is....yeah...

No.


I'm not putting that on a modeling/texturing/dynamics reel.  No way!  Solution: Game Hair. Now why didn't I think of that in the first place?

I love painting textures in ZBrush and Photoshop.  The girl's face is painted entirely in ZBRush. Even Henry is sculpted and painted in ZBrush. Henry took about 2-3 hours a day for 2 months to do.  For the girl, I painted a patch of hair in Photoshop, threw it on an alpha card, and sculpted her hair out of alpha cards. SO MUCH EASIER. Genius.  Here's one of the links I used as a tutorial:

http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html

The other one I used, which went into more detail about what custom brushed and painting techniques to use in Photoshop, I forgot to bookmark like an idiot.  But if you google "paint hair" and "Photoshop" you'll get tons of references. Just use whatever will help  you most for the project you are trying to accomplish.

Well, here is the final product: