This is the digital portfolio blog. This began with creating a mindmap of ideas and rough sketches, talking about ideas to create. Sketching took over the page and eventually a rough idea of the story began. A frog character meeting an explosive dog. Various rough random ideas threw onto the page.
After an idea was established we researched into what types of characters and inspiration for them. It began with real animals as they’re the easiest to find reference material for as well as something to take inspiration from, after finding cartoon and various other media relating to frogs, dogs and dinosaurs all to help establish a style and theme. This is split into 3 people, one for each character.
The entire page full of reference material, moodboard thoughts and rough ideas of potential ideas. This helped figured out aspects of the characters we wanted to keep and what to remove.
The initial sketches relating to the frog, he was originally fairly humanoid with more realistic anatomy, shoulders, chest, thighs etc. but taking the approach of wanting his limbs to be more exaggerated to allow for cleaner movement when animating, and to help push the arms and feet helped give him more cartoon proportions. The character had to be kept fairly simple mostly to help others on the team as the experience level of 3D animating was mixed so keep the design overall simple helps with only having to focus on the character and not other elements of the design, such as small objects that would move depending on follow-through and overlapping action.
The variations of colours of the character, going overly brash with the colour choices wasn’t an option cause the goal was trying to not over stimulate a younger audience with the short. Another aspect is the design was the outfit, the cowboy hat, holster and star were all aspects to have for the design however the star didn’t make it into the final design mostly an element that was forgotten about as the boots, hat and belt were enough to convince people of the design being related to a cowboy.
The start of the sculpting process, Zbrush was used to create the model as it makes sculpting an easier process. Beginning with simple shapes then then adding rough silhouettes to the shape to create the body then once everything is established on the body next we add extra details such as face refinement, sharpening aspects of the head, body and limbs and then working on the other parts such as the hat, belt and tongue.
What might be done next time is figuring out a method that could more closely reflect the ref sheet as parts of the face, some of the side of the head had to be changed during the process due to it not completely matching up with the model.
After sculpting next was retopology, UV mapping, texturing and finally rigging retopology was done to ensure that when creating the rig, it’ll deform in a way that makes sense and ensuring that no extra work is needing to clean up the rig later down the line and making weight painting easier to do because of the solid geometry. What would be best for next time is making sure the geometry is clean throughout as certain edge loops are awkward and made the rigging process awkward at times. Another element with rigging was having to do two different rigs, one was for maya then the second was for Blender. The blender rig was the one that was focused on more as everyone would need to use the rig to animate. Getting comfortable with Blender’s animation tools was a complicated process and took several weeks to feel even a minute amount of comfortable as I was with Maya.
During the process of creating animation for the main character, the dog needed to be retopologized, UV and textured as it needed some work done on it before Rigging. Rigging was sent off to another member of the team and was done. A fur texture was done on the model as well as the TNT, adding black to the nose and eyes would hopefully hide some of the model’s shortcomings.
For the future, rigging the character for the project would most likely be the best course of action with the most experience in that area and cleaning up weight paints would of helped with parts of the process however the final rig works for what’s needed for it.
These were the rough beginnings of the animated scenes, the first scene was the most focused as it was the longest. Follow-through, overlapping action, easing in and out, squash and stretch, anticipation had all been considered throughout as they were important factors when animating a scene. Squash and stretch help exaggerate some of the body movements too like when he jumped, even though its unrealistic it adds a bit of imperfection when it comes to reality as taking it straight from reality would of been fairly standard when the design idea was to be cartoony.
Exaggeration helped throughout too as the expressions in the second animation gives the sense of panic well however it could be argued that holding on a few frames to help establish shock would help push the shock more.
The use of live-action reference helped figure out the walk to some extent, and other parts of the animation as the full scene was full acted out to help understand movement and gestures. Lastly the jump was also filmed, helping understand the timing and movement of the spring-effect of a jump.
After animation was rendered out as two seperate pieces it was brought into after effects to be done in post-production. The character render was placed on top of the background render and then the background was blurred, added bloom and fire/smoke were also edited in with similar effects to help try and blend the entire scene together. Depth of field was the goal of blurring the background.
This process came together to create the finished scenes, smoke to help establish what was going on in the scenes the fire because of the context and the blur to create a depth-of-field effect.
The final film with sound and credits. The final film overall is solid the scenes come together to create a narrative although, what would best be figured out for next time is creating a pipeline that gets everyone onto the same page way before the small deadlines of each part was needed because elements of the production were rushed to try and get it finished for the deadline. However the animation work done helped create a cartoony 3d short which was the goal of the production overall.