Gronky looks pleased to see you, doesn’t he? 🙂

This week, 11 to 17 August, has been pretty productive. If you’ve been keeping up with the videos I’ve been posting to YouTube you’ll know that not only is Gronky fully modelled (bar tweaks for rigging), the rigging process has also begun.

This week’s videos:

• Modelling Gronky, part 5
• Modelling Gronky, part 6
• Modelling Gronky, part 7
• Modelling Gronky, part 8
• Modelling Gronky, part 9
• “A moment in the sun” character development (featuring story reel, alternative ending and more)
• Rigging Gronky, part 1
• Rigging Gronky, part 2
• Rigging Gronky, part 3

Pretty much everything I’ve been doing outside the day job that isn’t body maintenance of one sort or another can fall into one of three categories: working on Gronky, practising my gesture drawing or watching movies.

This week’s movies have been a quiet personal celebration of the late Robin Williams – still trending on Twitter as I speak. The evening after the news came through, I sat down and watched “The Birdcage”; “Awakenings” and “Bicentennial Man” followed later in the week. I’m starting to wonder if approached his characters by figuring out specifically how they’re funny, how they use humour, no matter what kind of character it is – a catty nightclub owner, a timid neurochemist or an android. The movie I’m really hanging out to see again is “The Fisher King”.

Aside from rediscovering just how talented Robin Williams was, people all over are also talking about depression – how it’s not the same as sadness, how it doesn’t play fair, how it doesn’t spare anyone it goes after however beloved they are – and it’s really encouraging to see that conversation happening. I have my own battles with depression (not as severely as some) and I think mental illness in general needs to be out in the open and better understood by the general community. It’s a damn shame that it had to take out one of the most beloved actors on the planet to get people talking about it, but people are talking about it now. It’s a small consolation.

And so to the other business of my week – getting Gronky done. I wanted to make sure he’d be ready to rig this weekend and I managed to hit that target after a few late nights. I spent all of yesterday putting a presentation together about how his character design evolved from a sort of cow thing to the character I’m modelling right now. 

Today (Sunday) I’ve been rigging Gronky’s model. So far Gronky’s eyebrows, eyes and lips all move. There’s also controls in place for his legs, head and arms/hands – these haven’t been weighted to anything as yet so they don’t do much. I haven’t got a curling control in place for the fingers yet either. It’ll come. 🙂

I wouldn’t say I’m a super-confident TD but after spending a few years learning about this stuff, I know a thing or two. Pointy was about a seven hour character build all up. Gronky is already taking much longer. There’s a few challenges around the face – specifically the mouth.

Aside from just modelling and rigging Gronky, I’ve also been trying out a couple of Blender features – the multiview (stereoscopy) branch and 360 degree rendering.

I’m one of the lucky owners of an Oculus Rift DK1 and thanks to a certain thread on BlenderArtists, I learnt that I can shove equirectangular-projected images into VRPlayer and view them from inside. I did a test scene of Gronky standing in the sun and Pointy standing in his shadow, then strapped the goggles on and.. it was so cool. Words can’t describe it. I don’t think I’ll be doing an equirectangular version of “A moment in the sun” but the idea of an immersive first-person movie is kind of intriguing. The problem is that in order to render for something on a really high definition device, you need to render at a really higher-than-playback resolution in order to account for the distortion. You get immersion though. Definitely. Being able to turn your head and for the world to keep on going – that’s the important part for the immersive feeling. Moreso than true stereoscopy in my opinion.

Stereoscopy on the other hand looks a little bit less terrifying. There’s a bit to learn – convergence, inter-ocular distance – but so far after playing with builds of the Multiview branch for Blender it seems pretty gentle. So far. I’m tossing up whether to do a stereo version of “A moment in the sun” or not. It’s a definite maybe. I’ll look into it. 🙂

That’s all for now. There’s a new modelling video going up soon but for now, back to it. 🙂