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It’s Sunday. Here’s what I did this week.

On Monday, Tuesday and Saturday I wrote drafts of a project I’m kicking around quietly. It’s proving a real bitch to get the tone right, so It may be a non-starter.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I began making Pointy from “A moment in the sun”. (He’s a bit peeved because I haven’t worked on him since Wednesday.)

On Thursday I worked on the bear nose morph test for the quiet project and posted a timelapse of it afterwards.

On Friday and Saturday I wrote a bit of music for fun – nothing worth showing off. The timelapses would definitely go better with music and narration, and thanks to VirtualDub it’s possible to add an audio track to a silent video without having to recompress the video. Useful!

The weekend has mainly been catching up on movies. I watched Barbarella, La Dolce Vita and The Godfather, Part III. Barbarella was very late sixties cute and silly; I enjoyed the memory of La Dolce Vita more than the experience of watching it because it went on for so bloody long; and Godfather III was.. well.. Sofia Coppola can direct better than she can act, that’s for sure.

I suspect La Dolce Vita’s going to need some time to digest. I liked 8 ½ and Fellini Satyricon better, though the image of a giant Jesus statue being flown across the city by helicopter is a great way to open a film.

HEY KIDS! HERE COMES HELICOPTER JESUS!

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Good news, everyone! Blender 2.71 Release Candidate with its sexy splash screen is now available! Quite possibly by the time you read this, the final version will be out, and quite possibly other versions besides.

And now for another video – still a build timelapse, but for a short proof of concept test for a surreal/absurdist project I want to do after “A moment in the sun”. It involves a metamorphosis. I wanted to be able to morph not just the mesh but also the textures and materials. This is a timelapse of a quick “first draft” attempt and shouldn’t be considered in any way authoritative about anything.

In this video, you can watch me:

  • modelling a cartoon bear’s snout based off reference art
  • repositioning the snout’s vertices to turn it into a human face
  • setting up driven shape keys to go between the two
  • altering the driver’s curves to give more character to the morph
  • setting up an armature for character animation
  • unwrapping the mesh and getting it ready for texturing
  • painting three different materials using Texture Paint 
  • failing to save one of the textures and having to paint it again >:|
  • fading between the different materials dynamically using drivers

Done in Blender 2.71 test version.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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A timelapse for the modelling process and part of the rigging process for Pointy from my forthcoming cartoon “A moment in the sun”. The video is unedited, complete with questionable decisions and short pauses when I get stuck – apologies for silence.

This character’s only ever meant to be seen side-on, hence the weird geometry.

In this video you can catch a glimpse of:

  • modelling with subdivided meshes and curves
  • using the Edge Crease tool (Shift-E in edit mode) to tell the Subdivision Surface modifier where not to get involved (various)
  • using Vertex Groups in combination with Shape Keys to non-desctructively model an eyelid 5:44
  • how not to model a hand if you know what’s good for you 6:25
  • how to make things circular using the Looptools add-on 9:04
  • how not to taper your curves
  • how to taper your curves using Taper Object 13:51
  • how to fix mistakes (too many instances of this to pinpoint)
  • how to build a basic rig
  • how to skin a rig so it looks horrid (right at the end)

Lots more to do, then. I’ll remember to hit “record” for part two. 🙂

Made in Blender 2.71 test build. Not using any specific new features though.

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It begins. Tonight I started modelling and rigging Pointy. Keep an eye on Twitter for a link to the video capture, or you can wait for me to post 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.