Well, it’s been a full week since I last updated, so here we go. I’ve been working out the alligator character so that he is animatable and sensible to work with. Surprisingly, there was very little to work out from my original design, just minor simplifications here and there. Specifically, the scutes on his belly and the frills on the back of his head. Instead of the frills going all the way to his tail, he only has four – three on the head and one on the upper back. And the scutes are formed only on the belly and tail – using the sphere form of his stomach to create the upper ones (one at the top, one at the bottom, and two splitting the sphere into thirds), and the cylinder forms for the ones on the tail. The chest area, on the other hand, has no splits in it. After a few attempts, I can get him roughly on model consistently, so that must count for something.

Still to do: Man model sheet.

Today I have been texturing my characters.

Neither are 100% finished, but I think I have made enough progress to post an update. Once these characters are complete, I will work on the environment.

The man is demonstrating the flipped normal polygon shader I researched, which is actually quite elementary. It will form the basis to most of the objects in my film, as I do not have enough polygons to do everything I want with the characters and props. His ear is the most obvious beneficiary of it.

Along with the UV Offset controls and Flipped Normal shaders, I will also be researching other ways to make my film look good while minimising the amount of work the renderer has to do. For example, a fake fresnel shader made with facing ratio hooked to transparency and some kind of colourisation. I’d know how to do it in a game engine, but not Maya, surprisingly!

And unfortunately, 400 polygons over budget – but for a reason. Most of the extraneous mesh is to make deformations more pleasing on the big screen, something I could get away with half the total on a games console.

Update:
Aligator: 100% modelled, 100% UV Mapped, 0% Rigged.
Posh Man: 100% Modelled, 100% UV Mapped, 0% Rigged.

Now that the animatic has been made, I can start work on the 3D models for the characters.

Since there are two characters within this short, I can spend a lot of time on them. I found out early on that using absolutely authetic methods for creating the characters is unfeasable – in a film you would need a lot cleaner, deformable meshes, so I increased my initial poly count limit from 600 to 800 (not including external “flair” mesh). The current mesh progress is:

Aligator: 100% modelled, 100% UV Mapped, 0% Rigged.
Posh Man: 80% Modelled, 0% UV Mapped, 0% Rigged.

Here are some progress renders:

Finally finished the first pass of the animatic, had to go in and actually animate some of the shots to get them to read.

1:51, just under my 2 minute cutoff point. I’m pretty pleased with it.

One of the challenges I have to face when doing a low poly piece is getting the right amount of subtlety when there isn’t enough geometry to accomodate for it. One of the subtle things I like to do is have nice eye movement in a character, so that they aren’t blankly staring out into space while performing their action – something that is a death knell to PSX characters rendered in high resolutions.

I had to create a method of moving the eyes cheaply and effectively, to keep within the zeitgeist of the era I am mimicking, while lifting the work to a new level of sophistication. To do this, I created a layered shader:

The Pupil – Just the eye, in the middle of a texture. It moves by changing the UV Offset attributes. An Alpha map is created to fill the entire eye area, eyelid included, so that no whitespace is visible where it shouldn’t be.
The Eyelid – This alpha map simply cuts out the eyelid so it can be placed upon the eye.

I created a proof of concept render with some programmer art, and it worked out pretty well. I faked an aim constraint by using a set driven key to drive the UV Offset with the XY translate attribute of a nurbs circle.

Since this is just a test, I plan on several improvements:

– Driving several eye expressions with the same nurbs controller.
– Using image sequences to drive eyelid expression with eyelid alpha and pupil alpha together.
– Changing the size of the eye area, the pupil, and enable complex deformation as to create smear-frame substitutes.

Regarding rendering, using a flat plane is inefficient for viewing the eye from different eyes, so two angled planes would be better, so that from the side, there is the illusion of three dimensionality. Another two faces need to be present for proper deformation.

I’m well into the preproduction for my newest animated short, “Mississippi Mud Pie”. Here are some model sheets for the two characters. Animatic pending!

The main character is an alligator. I wanted him to contrast the posh man, so I made him short, squat, and with big, expressive eyes. It was difficult to have a chunky character who also has a high dynamic range of movement. To counteract this, and make him look more like a gator, I opted to make his upper arms thin so that animation wouldn’t be hindered by having to take into account fat deposits there. It also gives a rather nice contrast between body and forearm.

The hardest part of the design, and what required the most redrafting had to have been the legs. I tried to come up with a compromise between my usual “stubby” choice and the more lithe, but more animatable legs I kept drawing for him. The wholly stubby leg design would limit animation and movement.

The Posh Man is the polar opposite of the aligator. Tall, lithe and composed, with a large cranium and hat (compared to the flattened cranium of the gator). I think the contrast will be fun to animate.