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I’m posting this image as a permanent reminder that I have a deceptive amount of free time at 6pm on a Sunday evening, even when I think I don’t.

So! Here’s Gronky’s modelling sheet with a big cheesy grin for good measure. It looks pleasingly like he is tapping himself on the shoulder. As you can see, he is now a large vaguely egg-shaped doofus as opposed to a large polony-shaped doofus. The hunch pokes his head forward and gives him this involuntary look of enthusiasm.

The basic design is a few weeks old now, from the first week of July even, but I’ve sat down tonight and refined it a bit. It might prove impossible to model, and even if it can be modelled it’s might prove impossible to animate, but it’s just a guide ultimately.

This week 21 – 27 July was not a hugely creative week. I was mostly either playing the highly addictive Mexican space sim Kerbal Space Program so that I can teach my nephew about astronautics or taking in a couple of movies.

This week’s movies were Orson Welles’s feverish 1958 film noir Touch of Evil and the 1967 school drama To Sir, With Love starring Sidney Poitier. ToE was great – almost proto-Coen Brothers with respect to certain scenes and characters. TS,WL was good in its own way, an enjoyable way to pass a Saturday afternoon.

Most of what I got up to this week I don’t want to show off – it’s either too unpolished and ugly or, in the case of what I did at this year’s “do what you like but get it done within 24 hours” marathon at work, exercising discretion about my employer’s identity. 🙂

It’s become something of a tradition for me to present some animation for this particular annual event. I made the company mascot in Blender last year, so this year I fixed the rig up and made a ten second video of it busting a move to some music we had playing. The shot was fully motion tracked off some video from a Samsung Galaxy S3.

I had a bit of trouble getting rid of the large tracking reference I put on the carpet and shadow catcher geometry seemed more important to sell the CG element, so the mascot ended up dancing on one of the team signs. Also the lighting wasn’t matched, the reconstruct was just good enough but the perspective was munted.. but it only had to go for ten seconds and get a laugh.

So I rendered and composited to a PNG sequence overnight, for there was no time to do comp/render separately without sacrificing sleep – I decided if it sucked, I just wouldn’t show it.

It didn’t suck. It was pleasantly well received, got a laugh at the project presentations, and a few people didn’t even tweak that the mascot was done in CG – they thought it was Peter Dinklage in a pint-sized mascot suit or something. I said we couldn’t get Peter Dinklage so we rebuilt that corner of the office at double scale instead and used a normal actor. Point being: basic motion matching and shadows go a long way to sell crappy everything else.

Incidentally, the Lens Distortion values for the S3 now that I’ve had time to figure them out appear to be in the neighbourhood of K1: 0.099; K2: -0.144 – or thereabouts. 🙂

So that was my week. This coming week I’ll have that modelling sheet to work off and I can start getting Gronky into virtual form.

By quollism

A creator of quollity stuff.

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