“Agent Hopper stands on trial after being caught in a break-and-enter; charged with forgery, damaging property, and… hopping dimensions.”
The original narrative pitched to myself followed this storyline and was set in a courtroom. It featured a rattlesnake judge, a gruff feline defence attorney, an injured owl, and the main ditzy rabbit herself – Hopper.
This was then changed around to being set in an interrogation room. The cat detective switching sides and instead investigating Hopper. This was also scrapped, though both settings would be comedic they would require scripts, voice acting, and an interesting environment (that would otherwise have been incredibly simple).
I suggested to our group of three that instead of following the aftermath, we show the events of the break-in instead.
The Revised Concept
“While trespassing, thief Hopper earns the ire of Claude the security guard and must escape from him, until a shiny artefact catches her eye…”
Bouncing ideas off of each other, staff and other groups helped rescript our narrative, which ended up with a much stronger story. The original plan for our film was for it to be a 3D cell-shaded style, similarly to the plot this eventually changes after testing. The fist weeks of the major project my team created multiple story pitches following our new ideas.
One suggestion was to really consider the message of the film, or at least the character’s motivation. We decided this was something along the lines of ‘don’t let anyone stop you from accomplishing your goals’, as originally Hopper sought out the Dimension box (a simple cube with a shiny red button, like that of a Ren & Stimpy cartoon) directly, and was chased around the environment before accidentally coming across her target. We created a Dimension Hopper – Miro board, where we revised the story over the weeks.
Eventually, after the previs was mostly finished and Acacia had made changes herself roughly following the Miro, the new pitch was formed.
“Word has spread across the city of a secret research centre found deep within the government archives. It is said to hold unusual, highly valuable artefacts of unknown origin and power…
Renowned detective, and thief, Agent Hopper is tasked to investigate.”
Having the box be an accidental find after touching artefacts destroying the archive, actually made more sense than giving her that goal. I think that keeping it more vague instead allowed for less confusion and questioning, and wouldn’t need as much story telling, rather than showing.
Initial Character Concepts
Realising that 4 characters would be too much to create, only Hopper and the cat remained – who was switched to a security guard, and officially named Claude!
The first few weeks of the major project, I was tasked with character designs. Trying to capture Chloe’s vision I sketched up a few concepts focussing on the face. At this time, the style was still to be a 2D shader, and so she was designed taking inspiration from known 3D rabbits; Zootopia, The Highway Rat, Hop, Peter Rabbit and Watership Down.
As we envisioned a 2D style 3D animation, we had planned that fur textures could be flat and hand-painted by myself, something I have experience in. It is interesting to see how rabbits are portrayed differently, and often aren’t anatomically similar to real rabbits. Long, tear-dropped shaped heads, small far apart eyes and sloped muzzles do not read as cutely as a rounded face, or large centred eyes and short noses does.
Considering this, my character concept sketches took more inspiration from flatter-faced, wide headed rabbit characters, as this style fit our comedic theme better.
In these sketches, one thing I did keep was further apart eyes. To try differentiate Hopper from other rabbit characters, and also to tone down the cute style, instead have her appear more mischievous and cunning with far apart, narrow eyes. The feedback we received was positive, but I was also aware that Hopper would need revised inevitably – as her current design was not 3D friendly.
Hopper’s design in most iterations stays quite simple, using mostly brown tones with gradients, based more-so off of a hare. As a group we preferred the more saturated colours, although the addition of the white swirl on her face I believe was a cute concept to represent the swirly dimension theme.
Hopper and Claude were designed to contrast each other. After group discussion and testing, Hopper’s colours were changed to warmer, more saturated tones and Claude would take a cool, greyish tone. Furthermore, as I had envisioned Claude being a gruffer, older character with a fluffy tail and moustache, Hopper was designed to parallel this with her fluffy neck and ankles. Claude’s sharper cat features; his ears and moustache, again were meant to contrast the softer bunny features.
It was harder finding inspiration references for Claude! We knew we wanted an exaggerated design, and so I thought mostly of elderly characters or gnomes/wizards/dwarves in media – characters who’s beard/moustache concealed when they spoke. A fairly common design choice, but one that fits well with the silly tones of the short.
Revised Characters
After our pitch presentation, one piece of feedback for the designs was that they were not (stylized) 3D friendly and needed to be simpler with more noticeable shape language. At this point we had decided about accessories – a ski mask, utility belt and gloves for the thief and more recognisable security guard items for the watchman.
Hopper’s face changed again from the last concepts, we decided going with a very cutesy, round face would suit her more. Hopper’s model was almost exact to the sketch and I believe hers was the more successful of the two. Her belt was heavily simplified later, as all that was really needed in the storyline was a pouch.
Claude’s markings would change in other versions down the line, but generally the colours for both Hopper and Claude stayed consistent as we preferred the contrast. In hindsight, I think Claude’s furry tail, neck and face may have actually needed reworking, or removal. It created a somewhat awkward shape and I should have discussed with my team more – the models were shaped to fit the sketch almost exactly, but I should have taken more consideration when designing him. His feet also when unnoticed by me, only after when talking with my team did they rightfully point out he had 4 toes in the aerial view of his paws, but 3 in the front view!
Furthermore, due to the models very closely referencing the sketches, Claude’s head hangs low and created issues when modelling. It was planned that Claude would have a more hunched posture, however for the character modelling I have learned the sketches should be as straight as possible and unposed.
Texture Tests
BBC’s Peter Rabbit has hand-painted, flat fur textures instead of a groom. This method would work better with the toon shader, and was suggested to us by the lecturers. The first version of the Hopper model (sculpted by Chloe Bowman) was given to me for experimentation, I researched other methods of hand-painting fur; using height maps, sculpts, or generators and nodes but my initial test was a simple flat texture.
The eyes, eyelashes, brows and linework around the nose/mouth are painted overtop the model, but the fur was an actual texture. I received feedback that it was quite flat, and I agree. For a final texture, I would have added actual shading to the fur texture, possibly height maps at the tips of the fur tufts. It would be tedious but for a 2D style animation would have amplified the visuals.
I wanted to practise more hand-drawn textures, in case certain assets were needed so another test was painted. Here, the fur texture has much more depth and was what I was originally planning for the textures, thought a fully hand-painted model in this style would have been a very long process.
Similarly, wooden, fabric or metal objects painted in this style, while interesting and detailed, I think would have been too much if I was to create the entire full environment and its assets.
Changing Direction
Our second preproduction presentation introduced a new style to research instead; a Claymation stop-motion. In one of our group feedback sessions with the staff, some of our 2D shader tests showed disappointing and uninteresting results. I suggested a clay style as I was inspired by the stop-motion animations other artists were creating so well in Blender, I thought we could give it a try.
Achieving the Clay Look
As we had decided to keep the models flat, I wanted to explore a clay material by hand. I knew that there would be a possibility the clay material wouldn’t be exact or even convincing, so by hand painting some clay tests I believe I was able to better understand the shapes and quirks of modelling clay. In fact, heavily textures brushes, halftones and rakes were the best brushes for conveying clay details (fingerprints especially).
Had we initially decided to do a clay style animation, the character concepts would have been much different. For one, all details like a lighter muzzle or tummy would, realistically, be another slab of clay overtop the body. Later, I try to achieve this with height maps, but otherwise for a more convincing puppet details and features would have all been separate and stick out.
Materials
Although much less common than a toon shader, Blender’s capabilities made for very convincing clay materials. I researched how some artists were creating this; be it a simple fingerprint overlay and a displacement node, or a snappy, fully animated node tree with fingerprint specific roughness maps, normal maps, billows and colour contamination – just like real modelling clay.
The latter (SouthernShotty) being my personal favourite, I tested all 3 methods – all very different. Something that was consistent in the videos I watched was the addition of a fingerpint texture to be used as either an alpha or a connected node for the roughness, normals and albedo. I created my own fingerprint texture, made with photoshop fingerprint brushes and smears.
In the final film, I ended up being pressed for time and used a method similar to the first video, a very simple and quick fingerprint texture linked to the albedo and roughness, and a reversed normal, combined with a slight displacement modifier on the models. But as I did my experimentation evidently the more detailed node tree approach looked much better and very convincing.
The displacement and fingerprint texture location are animated, and it creates a very nice result. Though I had this blender file saved, and appending the node tree worked on some models, it didn’t work for the character rigs. For the End of Year Show, I hope I can get this version complete with animation working for the characters.
Lighting Tests
For our final production presentation, I worked on a simple materials and lighting test with some of the environment models. Taking inspiration from Aardman and Laika animations, the body is entirely ‘clay’ whereas the eyes are ‘plastic’ or glass – hence the shine. I would have liked to make the mask and/or bag a fabric, like felt with very fine hair nodes, but this lighting test I think showed the mask as clay very nicely.
It’s subtle, but the clay material also includes another node I personally thought would look interesting – a colour ramp generated with billows. The idea was that it would give some colour variation to what would otherwise be a simple flat coloured character. Again, as she is meant to look like she is made out of clay it would not make sense if she had flat markings, so I thought the addition of colour variation (shades of red, orange and brown) would help make the clay appear like it was just not properly mixed or rolled. This idea carried on to the final textures.
Lighting a nigh time scene is quite a challenge, I had to research how they are typically shot in both real stop-motion animations, and 3D animations. Typically, a physical night set can’t be fully achieved and so is edited in post. It is very important that lights are static in stop-motion, and are not usually ever moved per shot in a single environment. A black backdrop is often used to absorb light and not create any unwanted reflections. Blue tinted lights are used as well, and are darkened later in post.
For a 3D scene, I can manually darken the world in the properties tabs. I used an in-built HDRI for some automatic lighting, but added a 3-point lighting setup for Hopper, which I learned from some YouTube tutorials. I’m not experienced or confident with lighting, but I did enjoy the process! I improved from this test in the final animation, this test I believe is a little too bright but I did like the addition of orange secondary lighting, I may add more of this in the final animation.
The criticisms we received back after the production presentation greatly helped steer our visuals to a much more pleasent look. A main point was that the clay texture of the models was too intense, and that it would be useful to add the clay material to a moving shot of the character. In the second image below, the fingerprints were instead generated by a Musgrave texture node rather than an alpha – the idea was that this node wouldn’t replace any albedo, which the previous ones did and needed to be adjusted using a ‘mix shader’ node. This was a main issue if we were wanting to have markings on the characters, a mix shader node would have dulled the painted textures and colours.
The Musgrave texture above was deliberately intense for the presentation, as I thought on the board you wouldn’t be able to see it! Same with the colour variations, which were also barely visible when presented, I just had forgot to mention. I am glad however we didn’t go with this option as it isn’t as natural looking as a real fingerprint texture.
Texture Painting
Originally, the characters were just going to have base colours that, in blender, I would add to using texture nodes. I still do believe this is the most realistic approach to a ‘clay’ character with no indented markings, but after taking some feedback from the lecturers I agree that this would have been too simple.
I took my ideas into substance painter, creating swirling colour variations and ‘dirt’ marks first for all the materials. Using my own fingerprint texture, I made some normals, albedos and roughness maps to use with it (as well as an alpha and metal, which were not used). However, when applying the maps unfortunately the UV seams were visible, and couldn’t be fixed or hidden. This idea had to be scrapped, as it was both the roughness and normals causing issues.
Instead I generated a texture myself in substance, using grunge, fingerprints and scratches for the clay with built-in generators and textures. Underneath the blender material, I think this was a nice touch and gave a bit more depth. The colour variation however is quite subtle, but I believe it helps.
The theory for the specks was that they were ‘smears’, colour contamination 0r dust. On Hopper, there are quite a lot! I possibly should have toned these down a little. Finally, although it was too late to add physical geometry overtop the character’s bodies, I could at least fake it with height maps. I outlined her tummy and eye patches, the specks, and her paw pads, on an indented layer, and then on separate layers heightened the markings. This process was quite messy, and it changed to an easier version for Claude, the problems arose when layering heights, they are either clearly visible or even each other out. I had to be very careful when outlining something large and noticeable like her tummy.
Originally, the ‘clay’ was going to be based off of Aardman’s preferred modelling clay, which itself is quite shiny. However, I wanted her eyes to be very clearly a ‘different’ material, like glass, resin or plastic, so the body roughness was turned up for a matte look.
Claude was more simple, his colour variation even more subtle unfortunately but I attempted to give him some more interest with a metallic high vis vest, and and tabby cat stripes. I think this helped with his design immensely, the concept sketches with the dark muzzle and eyebags had bothered me, and I’m glad I changed it so his face was brighter.
Both Hopper and Claude’s eyes were hand-painted in Procreate instead, originally this was only used as a placeholder which would be repainted in substance, but as I tested it I preferred the outcome from the other app. I wish only that Claude’s eyes were larger, to maybe fix the odd far-apart look of his eyes.
Hopper’s textures ultimately worked out well and was promising when brought into blender. However, after giving Claude stripes and attempting the same process as Hopper’s tummy indent (though simplified, just an outdent) strangely wasn’t cooperating in Blender. When one side would be fine, the other side was reversed, no one on the team would figure it out, even after changing all the possible node and render options that could be affecting it. Eventually though after some more experimentation, it was fixed with a multiple RGB nodes with reversed properties.
RENDR Festival
I had received some tickets from the university to go to the RENDR festival in February, and planned on attending as many relevant talks as possible. I found this experience to be very useful, in particular ‘The Making of Chicken Run’ by Aardman animation which allowed me to understand the real process for stop-motion animation – the lighting set up, materials, cameras, rigs, etc.
I took note of all potentially useful information from Aardman, and as I knew I was to create our lighting setup I joined the ‘Designing and Shooting Miniatures in a Modern VFX World’ which was also surprisingly useful for our project, in particular the comments about 3-point lighting and camera focal points, aperture (low) and depth of field, which should be shallow.
At the festival, I got speaking with many other artists. One person I spoke to was a freelance stop-motion animator who used paper and fabric puppets for his work. I greatly appreciate the advice given to me, especially about the typical movements, camera and lighting sets he used. I added a lot of this condensed to our Miro board in hopes we could reference this.
The Environment
As my other team members would be busy with animation, which is something I don’t think I am experienced in (especially when in Blender), I suggested that I create our assets and environment. My original simple 3D environment was further blocked in by Acacia, which I then built the final environment on.
Concept Art
The initial concept for the environment was that it was a high-tech, very sci-fi style research laboratory. I had ideas of sharp blocky models with LED lighting which would frame the scene. I began sketching some simple items, our keycard system sci-fi door, a cubed potted plant (straight bamboo – I thought it was the most modern looking of plants!) with lit indents and one of the main objects, a pedestal for our cube.
However, with our storyline, a scientific lab wouldn’t make a ton of sense housing ‘artefacts’. Instead, it was suggested we try a ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ style warehouse, with the idea that artefacts were being shipped in. This would match better with the thief Hopper angle, that she was somewhat of an Indiana Jones, exploring a secret facility in search of a valuable item. In my own fault, I went ahead with this idea, creating boxes, crates, carts and industrial shelving that would clutter an old dusty warehouse – but I didn’t communicate fully with my team. When we spoke more in depth, only then had I realised we didn’t fully decide on an environment theme and they were under the impression we were still making a lab.
No items would go to waste, however, as after we met in a Tuesday class we nailed down our subject – a mix of both! An old, secret government ran building, with somewhat modern sci-fi technology but a dim, cluttered archive. The entrance would be higher-tech, where the guard sits, but upon entering the research centre the bookshelves would line the walls and papers, files and crates would house documents and artefacts. Separating the older archive from the laboratory deeper in the building, a sci-fi corridor would prevent Hopper from entering (lasers!), and this secondary archive would be more technical; as it holds the valuable, unstudied, unstable ‘dimension box’ – implying that scientists have not risked touching the button.
Acacia’s concept sketches and thumbnails for the environment exactly captured this new idea, and I got to work creating the models.
Asset Modelling
Many assets were created pre style change, so it was a matter of deciding which assets to make out of ‘clay’ and which to reference real physical objects that may be found on a stop-motion set.
The LED design for some assets was still something I wanted to keep, things like the plant pot, pillars, and wall decals were what I thought would work best for this. In the original concept for the plot, artefacts and other objects get broken by Hopper, so there was a few tests for the fractures and LEDs that would shine through.
Before the style change, I was still experimenting with hand-painted textures. I really like this pot, later on it gets more detail, I think I may try repaint this one day. It doesn’t match the style now, however I think the light bump texture on top of the leaves would have worked nicely to mimic clay.
I began working on a list of items I would need, most main assets documented on the Miro. I worked by room, so the entryway with Claude’s office being first – desks, chairs, bookcases, computers, CCTV and file blocks. In the previs I hadn’t noticed a major change – adding a staircase. I had only realised this was desperately needed when I was messaged about it, while our group’s communication was good in our discord server, some things just slipped through. I had made many larger items to fill up the scene, and went in later with smaller things like cameras, books, and pipes. Though I can’t exactly think of anything missing from the scenes, I feel as though there could have been more variety with my objects – a second different desk, a full body scanner, or archways could have perhaps added more to the scene.
Claude’s hat was made to look like a sheriff hat, but I ended up remaking this later – it doesn’t fit the theme nor the concept art! It was remade to resemble more a police hat. His glasses were originally going to be a sleeping mask, but for ease of animation, and because it looked funnier, I made simple cat-eye sunglasses instead. These along with the key card are some of the only current textured objects, simple colour variation and fingerprint grunge, which I will hopefully replicate for the larger objects.
An idea I had early on was making the environment look as if it really was handmade; desks made from wooden lolly sticks, globs of glue, corrugated cardboard walls and artefacts found in small real-world items like marbles, coins, rocks and buttons. I did take this idea for some items, there are marble ‘orb’ artefacts, a sword resembling a novelty toothpick and windows made to reference dollhouses. Realistically, most items could have been designed to look like miniatures or plastic toys, although this would cut the level of detail way down (considering most miniature play furniture is flat coloured, or very simple) but would have required a very convincing clay and lighting setup.
The high domed wings of the building were inspired by Belfast’s own Castle Court, the multi-windowed skylights look both modern and dated. Though I didn’t keep this building shell, I did make similar ceilings as the skylight was something I wanted to include within the environment. Not only do they look large, open, and grand, it provides a plausible source for lighting.
Originally these sci-fi walls were going to frame the whole environment, but I later changed this to ‘clay’ bricks. These only stayed for the corridor.
With the environment theme fully decided upon, unfortunately a lot of the industrial assets were pushed to corners, as they didn’t fully fit into the scene. They still did provide some needed filler, though.
References
The staircase was one of the more intricate models, and though I am happy with it and it’s resemblance to my own stairs, I feel as though it doesn’t read as a handmade object, at most possibly a dollhouse staircase. However, without proper concept art for larger items like this, it may have been hard to design and model it quickly when it was needed. I took a lot of inspiration for most models from real items, or other media.
Claude is a security guard, meaning he needed CCTV cameras for his desk. The environment block out just had 2 monitors, which with my more retro final computer model, wouldn’t work. Authogin’s Confabulation: Homestead had a solution for CCTV cameras I especially liked – a stack of small retro style CCTV CRT monitors. Behind Claude’s desk, a stack to this similar sits.
Full Environment
Finally, I was able to fully furnish the environment. I actually took the block out into Maya, as I’m not confident with Blender, and began firstly replacing all the walls. As the final animation had began using the block out, I had to be careful to replace everything in their original spots. Though I did try to keep it similar, when sending the team my environment they had to move some objects around – then, it was given back to me for more adjusting. I also took some time to set up special materials for certain objects; glass, plastics, clay, metal and stone.
Every asset for this submission was simply given a flat base material, all had to be manually edited later in Blender to tone the roughness and turn the metals off for most items. The signs were textured however (6 in total), with height and roughness maps to match, however for the ease of the submission and for my team, they went with just the albedos.
I kept with mostly earth tones, the brick walls were to appear like different shades of orange modelling clay, though it was suggested by the lecturers I tone down the other colours of the environment so as not to distract from the already orange and grey characters.
All assets were modelled in Maya, though I would like to learn Blender fully, I was not confident I could make my objects as quickly or as efficiently as I could in Maya.
I provided the final lighting as well. Using a built-in HDRI from Blender gave the scene a quick setup, then going into all the materials that were supposed to glow, added an emission. Emissions don’t give off any light that affects the environment, so a linked group of pillar lights had to be made (2 per pillar, bottom and top lights), the plant pots, sky dome’s moons and the floating orbs all linked respectively. At this point, I was worried there was too much blue light, but the final lighting rendered nicely.
The moons were a last minute addition – I had used a background I painted for the domes’ textures but didn’t consider the moon in the paintings, which of course would dull. Adding emissions to the dome didn’t work, so I decided to just use spheres with a very high emission value and cover the drawn moon. I really like the result, and only wish there were a shot of the entire archive entry to show it!
I was also underwhelmed by the box, and so thought that adding the moon and a point light to shine upon the pedestal would draw attention to it and highlight the sign above, that read “do not touch”. This definitely helped, but after the 2nd round of renders, I have since gone in and added an orange top light to accentuate the box further. We spoke as a group after the last render, and we plan on adding a little more environment ambience with possibly some fog, and maybe some different coloured 3-point lighting – something I tried to include in my setup, but only really works well when using different colours.
The Establishing Shot
More lecturer feedback suggested that we have an intro that establishes the location of the film. I took to designing some half sci-fi, half library like buildings for this. I am not confident with environment art, especially hard surfaces like buildings, but I am happy to have had the chance to experiment and learn.
I’m personally a visual learner, so looking at other building concepts and environment art was particularly useful. I was drawn immediately to video tutorials and speed-paints, seeing the process and thought that goes into designing a structure was necessary for me to understand. In architecture, nothing exists without thought.
Most other films that share our theme do a similar shot, called an ‘establishing shot’, which provides location context to the viewer. I really liked this idea, as it also gave a perfect moment to clarify the motivation of and reason why Hopper was exploring the building, by adding some text in the intro to explain this. I thought, similarly, I could take inspiration from heist or spy fiction which often use a typewriter effect for info like the date, time or location when shown on screen (think; Independence Day, Legion, most Marvel films) TV Tropes calls this a ‘title in’, but it is often referred to as a ‘chyron’.
The Final Establishing Shot
Admittedly drawn and coloured quickly, I think I would like to go in and add some texture to the building, much like what I did for the clay paintings. I merged all 3 designs above to create this final building, that also mirrors our environment shell, and tilted skyward for a more grand appearance.
The night sky background was used in the window domes for the environment, to keep everything consistent! I believe I managed to capture our overall theme well with this half modern/half historical archive.
Editing
Finally, I was originally meant to edit the full final film but Acacia instead took over as she had experience with sound design. I was still to create the environment art for the intro, so decided I could make both the full intro and outro with credits. I really enjoyed the process of using After Effects, its something I hope to look into after graduation as I found myself playing with the effects, graph editor and design.
I wanted a shiny end title for the project, so using a sweep effect a very nice looping shine. I also wanted to include the characters at the side, so using a wave and shapes created a simple portal design.
I’m very happy with the outro, however upon rendering the intro the animation was cut at the start, meaning the fade in and first bits of typewriter text was lost. I hope to fix this for the show, as I’m disappointed in the rendered results. I think I know what caused this, so it is only a matter of fixing the composition settings. Also, in the final animation the outro appears too fast, so I will try add a fade in to the beginning to fix this.
The Final Animation
Overall, I’m happy with the results! I am disappointed with some of the visuals, which was my main job for this project. I wish I had planned and made more time for certain aspects – namely the asset textures. For the final show, I hope to have at least some of the main (or those that are shown close up, i.e. pedestals) objects textures, even slightly, as it would make a huge difference. My team did a great job with the stop motion animation style, and I hope they are proud!
I believe I took all feedback on well, and this was for the best. Coming in to final year I knew keeping an open mind to criticism would be a necessity. My communication and time management was not the best this year at certain points (though, because of a personal situation), but I am proud to have gotten through the year and learned many new techniques, dabbled in new areas (lighting and editing) and created a better, fuller, portfolio.
I am pleased with the result, however I know there is definitely room for improvement and I am looking forward to the feedback from my peers and staff.
Find the portfolio and some personal projects at ArtStation – Megan McColm !
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