Tag: grumpy squirrel

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A storm seems to have knocked the Internet here back online – barely – so I’m going to do a post anyway.

Five days out of the seven of 14 – 20 July I was ill or otherwise impaired. I’d mostly shaken my flu on Friday night, then just after I woke up on Saturday morning I started having a migraine aura. Cue madly dashing around the house finishing chores with impaired vision before the migraine proper hit. Still feeling queasy now. Blurk.

On Monday I watched Hitchcock’s Psycho and worked on my drawing. On Tuesday I was starting to get sick and didn’t feel up to very much at all – though I did start watching Psycho 2. As one does.

From Wednesday to Saturday I was various degrees of ill (either flu or migraine) and set myself the task of watching all four seasons of Rocko’s Modern Life from start to finish. I succeeded in being front of all of them as they played, though I lost consciousness more than once. I’m not a fan of series 4 – once Joe Murray got more hands off with the show it feels like it lost a bit of its sharp edge and the mental ages of the .

On Friday night I wrote a bitterly tongue-in-cheek theme tune for a low-budget animated series I want to make called Grumpy Squirrel. The last thing I posted about yon squirrel was back in April when I sculpted his head out of clay after the 3D model failed to dutifully scowl from all angles. More about Mr Squirrel later.

I also worked on a piece of beepy ambient music to help with animation timing. If it turns out to be useful, I’ll post it.

I also did some more playing around with Freestyle, the source of this week’s pictures. I wanted to try some nice tapered lines around some cartoon “hair tuft” geometry – alas, the lines were popping depending on perspective. BlenderNPR’s super awesome Freestyle course advises that models are better built from the ground up to work with Freestyle – maybe the geo just wasn’t right for it. Despite setbacks I’m liking Freestyle a lot as a tool and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing BEER get off the ground. More experimentation needed!

Today (Sunday) I did some written development work on Grumpy Squirrel. After an unsatisfactory brainstorming session earlier in the week I’m trying to figure out where the series is coming from, looking for the hook, even just an episode synopsis that can serve as a good tonal foundation for everything that follows. It’ll come. Just have to keep working at it.

Today’s big impromptu creative spew though was a 23-minute hypnotic house tune. Or maybe it’s psychedelic house. I’m not sure what genre it fits into. It is pleasantly ear-amusing though.

No movement on “A Moment in the Sun” this week. Gronky’s design is still proving elusive. Once I finally nail it and take it to modelling, I’ll have many many pages of character design exploration to post here as the road I took… many many pages…

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Doing some old-fashioned sculpting with oil-based clay today, trying to get a better read on Grumpy Squirrel’s facial shapes. His current virtual incarnation doesn’t register a pouty scowl properly from all angles, so I’m roughing it out with real media.

It’s my first clay sculpt in a while. I discovered something new about how to build a cartoon squirrel nose today, so that’s kind of cool. I don’t know if I’m going to refine this too much more – it was really just to get an idea of how to shape a frowning mouth that frowns whatever way you look at it.

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Some of yesterday and pretty much all of today I was working on an entry for Blendernation’s weekend contest. The theme was “Above the clouds”.

Eventually I put Grumpy Squirrel above the clouds, whimsically riding a balloon to the great unknown.. until the ribbon unexpectedly snaps. (Stupid squirrel! Next time use a carbon fibre ribbon!)

Rig-wise.. it’s not a great rig. For some reason I have trouble making characters with fully functional shoulders. It’s a weak spot and I want to work on it.

I did however learn a cool new Blender trick about renaming lots of armature bones lickety-split (“Select pattern…” > look for L.001 + W menu > Flip Sides in Armature editor = glee!) and how to mirror vertex groups that don’t cross the midpoint of the X axis (in Vertex Groups panel: Copy vertex group on vertgroup.L to get vertgroup.L_copy, Mirror it, then delete vertgroup.R and rename vertgroup.L_copy to vertgroup.L).

Grumpy’s far from actually animation-ready at this point but only because rigging and especially skinning takes forever to do right. Especially shoulders, for some reason.

Also I reconfirmed today that dub is superlative background music to ignore while working – at least for me it is.

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Still modelling Grumpy Squirrel.

Just in case you’re thinking “What is this sorcery and where can I get some?”, this gallery of horrors is courtesy of Blender 2.70’s shiny new Laplacian Deform modifier.

The workflow goes like this:

  • Make a new vertex group. Select it. Name it something relevant like “Laplacian Deform Anchors” or “Anchors”.
  • Add vertices to a hook by highlighting them and hitting Ctrl+H to add them to a new hook (this will create an empty)
  • Immediately hit Ctrl+G to add them to your anchors group
  • Repeat on different patches of verts that you want to use to control deformations – your modifier stack will have a Hook modifier for each hook you add. It’s a good idea to rename these as you go. Make sure you put any Hook modifiers underneath the Mirror modifier if you’re using it.
  • Once you’ve some hooks ready to go, add the Laplacian Deform modifier from the Deform menu. If you’re using the Subdivision Surface modifier, make sure that it’s being applied after the Laplacian Deform or Blender will chug on bind.
  • Select your “Anchors” group as your.. er.. anchors vertex group and hit Bind. Let it finish. (You’ve been hitting Ctrl+G to add your hooked verts to your anchor group as you go, right?)
  • Move one of your hooked empties. Instead of just moving the hooked set of vertices, the mesh should react more like you’re stretching a rubber figure.

Tips:

  • Up the Repeat parameter to let the modifier refine its solution.
  • If you’re working with a character and the stretching is too unpredictable and weird, make sure you’ve put hooks on all the extremities. If something between two hooks is moving when you don’t want it to, try adding a hook to it.
  • Remember the ordering: Mirror, then Hook modifiers, then Laplacian Deform, then Subdivision Surface. Hook before Mirror will tear the mesh at mirror points; Laplacian Deform after Subdiv will cause chug.
  • Unlike armatures, empties don’t return to a useful default position when you hit Alt+G. If you want them to, parent them to bones in an armature.
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Well this is terrifying..