Here is a glorious golden retopologised quoll, mostly done. Some of the topology around the neck.. well.. we won’t talk about. And there’s a reason the hand is out of shot. It is so not done yet.
But I did spend Australia Day modelling a quoll and now I know a bit more about how to use Contours and Polystrips so.. uh.. yay! 🙂
Welcome to 19 to 25 January 2015. Hectic task switching at the dayjob this week sucked a lot of my energy away so I didn’t get much done after hours, but it’s the Australia Day long weekend this weekend so I’m modelling an Australian animal. A quoll to be precise.
This quoll is slated to appear in two shots of “A moment in the sun” from the waist up. Since both appearances are waist up, I’m not bothering to model any legs. Waist-up is fine. Just like a newsreader.
I started doing a screencast recording for the quoll’s build process (just like the old days!) but for some reason the screencasting was interfering terribly with sculpting. So, no screencasts until I’m ready to retopo him. Maybe tomorrow. Making a screencast, in particular doing the narration, is time I could be spending dragging the movie towards being finished. Admittedly so is playing Far Cry 4, but some days you just want to hop on a friendly elephant and trample goons.
The rewrites are still ongoing – at this point the story’s done and it’s all dialogue and gag rewrites, just trying to funny it up, give it more snap. The biggest story and design task remaining is Pointy. He’s coming along well but I’ve yet to nail a voice and character tone for him. I’ve got a running gag for him which shows some promise, a good character bit. 🙂
Over the week I read The Noble Approach, a book about the renowned animation designer Maurice Noble. It made me realise that I have done precious little production design for this project, yet at the same time the book gave me a solid idea of what points design is involved when making a cartoon. It’s a solid and wisdom-packed book which I can highly recommend.
Hopefully the day job eases off next week so I can get stuck into the movie again and shunt it along from rough animatic to planning. If my whole working year is like this though, the movie’s going to take a very very very very very long time to find the energy for. Wish me luck!
Neither of them are fully done but here are Gronky and Pointy, modelled in 3D in their default poses. Pointy has a rig but Gronky doesn’t yet. Want to fix up his hands before I get started. This is a work in progress render, not indicative of final materials or lighting.
Still, there’s my adorable gormless derp and pointy-nosed git who won’t get out of his shadow, together for the first time. Finally. 🙂
This week – 4 to 10 August – I modelled some more Gronkyface. You can watch part 2, part 3 and part 4 on YouTube.
Other than that I kept on grinding the exercises from Proko’s figure drawing course and did gesture drawings of both human figures and animals. I’m now psychologically conditioned to doing gesture drawings when I see breasts. I’ve also started practising cubes in perspective for practice. Hopefully I don’t develop a similar urge to draw whenever I open Blender.
Speaking of Blender, I’ve bought a ticket to Blender Conference 2014.
I figured out how to get Blender’s stereoscopy branch compiling in Xubuntu so I’ve been playing with that a little bit. Cheap cardboard red and cyan glasses at the ready, I’ve had a look at Gronky and Pointy and even Ktish in stereo.. and now I really want to try doing a stereoscopic version of “A moment in the sun”. Which means buying a stereoscopic monitor and learning how to do stereoscopic rendering, probably. Aside from doubled rendering times, closing various knowledge gaps and the fact 3D isn’t really a thing yet, it’s super-tempting.
I’ve been poking around in Houdini, the procedurally-based 3D editor. It looks very shiny and its introductory training material is great. I got inspired and tried to write a short and sweet video introduction to Blender. It’s currently about 30 minutes long. I will tame it another time.
I was ready to do some more modelling after narrating the Gronky videos from this week, but I discovered that the cat killed a baby black rat tonight. Well, I _say_ killed – what it did was mortally wound it, leaving its dismayed co-habitants to put the poor thing out of its misery. Anyway, I now know how to humanely euthanise small animals using common household items.
I wrote the rat a short threnody/tone poem to try to work through the experience a bit but Reaper refuses to render it out; it’s throwing an error I’ve never ever seen before. Probably for the best too. It’s not a very cheerful piece.
Anyway.
On a more cheerful note, I’d like to have Gronky’s mesh ready to go by the weekend. I have a sneaking suspicion my day job will have some ideas of its own, but I’ll do my best.
For this Sunday weekly report, you can listen to me rabbit away at high speed about modelling Gronky.
This week – 28 July to 3 August – instead of getting stuck into modelling Gronky straight away I started a figure drawing course. I feel like I’m being held back by my lack of confidence and skill with gestures, rhythm, anatomy, construction and perspective, so I got myself a drawing board & a charcoal pencil on Monday evening and I’m going through the figure drawing fundamentals course from Proko. It is a damn good course. Already I’m feeling much less anxious about drawing poses and perspectives that I used to avoid, and my previously stiff drawing style is tentatively showing more swing and groove than before.
In addition to Proko’s supplied models, I’ve been using the same techniques to gesture draw naked people on Pixelovely. Today I tried gesture drawing some animals and I had varying levels of success. Thick fur is problematic for some animals in figuring out anatomy. I know I should try to master one species at a time but I like drawing beasts too much. 🙂
On Tuesday evening, I wrote a synopsis for a fantasy story in the hope I can trick it into going away and leaving me alone until I’m ready to deal with it. I already have too much stuff to work on. 🙂
On Thursday evening I got stuck in and started modelling Gronky – the video above should tell you everything I have to say about that. Basically, it’s coming along but the process is not without its bumps.
Here and there this week I’ve also been drawing some “Grumpy Squirrel” for fun, trying to get a better handle on his character.
Movies I watched this week include the infamous revenge-of-nature flick “Sharknado” and Duncan Jones’s sci-fi thriller “Source Code”. I don’t know if I can honestly recommend “Sharknado” but “Source Code” was pretty good. 🙂