Awesome Maya Plugin

Just wanted to share this awesome plugin I found for Maya.  In one of our scenes Bang and Boom are playing catch and I wanted an easy way to parent and unparent the ball they are throwing to their hands.  I searched online and found this:

 ZV Parent Master

Check it out.  It's great.

First Playblast

Hey everyone.  Here is the first playblast of the first scene I worked on.  It's pretty short but I wanted to do a quick shot first just to get a handle on using the new rig.  Feel free to leave any comments especially fellow animators.  Constructive criticism is definitely welcome.

Absence

Hey everyone.  Sorry there hasn't been any posts in the past 2 weeks.  I was dealing with some personal decisions about life, the universe, and everything.  All's good now and I finally started animating yesterday.  Should start posting some playblasts by next week.  If you are a fellow animator and have any constructive criticism feel free to post them.  That is one of the reasons I'll be posting them.  Stay tuned.

Bang and Boom Pose

Now that I have the finished rigs I wanted to play around with them and put them in a pose.  It was important to me to show their personalities in this one pose and I think I accomplished that.  Bang is the cool and confident brother.  He protects his brother but also enjoys playing jokes on him.  Boom on the other hand is a bit clumsy and tends to be in his own little world.  He's definitely the comic relief but he doesn't know it.  I even used this image to make myself a new business card.  Hope you like it.

Rigging Finally Complete!

It took longer than I thought but the rigs for Bang and Boom are finally complete!  I want to give a special thanks to Tiru for fitting in all the work he did on the body rig in between all his grad student work.  It turned out great.  For time saving purposes, I myself ended up doing the rig for the face.  So now that the rigs are complete, animation is a go.  Right now I'm shooting to finish animation by the end of May.  I'll definitely post some playbasts along the way.

While I'm animating, Wallace will be busy painting textures for the sets and Noah will be finishing off our other two characters for me to animate once they are done. 

Here are the rigs.

Animatic finished

I finished this last Friday but completely forgot to post it.  Here is just a part of the animatic.  Keep in mind it is really rough but it gives me an approximation of the timing of the shots and camera angles.  Obviously these things might change once I actually animate it but it's a good place to start.  Check it out.

Animatic

I'm still waiting on the finished rigs for Bang and Boom but in the meantime I've been working on a 3D animatic with a test rig Tiru had sent me last week.  It should be done by tomorrow so I'll post some of it when it's done.  I'm trying to get the timing of the shots down as well as the camera angles.  This will help me figure out how the story flows as a whole and will allow me to make any changes that need to be made before I actually start animating.  Getting the cameras set will also help Wallace see where we might need high res textures if we get up close to anything.  I'm also blocking in character positions and movements around the environment to get a sense of where they'll be throughout the piece.  Come back tomorrow and the animatic should be posted.

Rigging in progress. More artists contribute.

There hasn't been much to post in the last two weeks since I'm waiting for Bang and Boom to be rigged. And the man doing them is named Tirumalai Shanmugam.  Check out his work here:  http://www.wix.com/tiru_malai/tiru.  I met him last year at the Ottawa Animation Festival and he was great enough to offer his rigging expertise to our film. He started them this past weekend and they should be done by the end of the week so I should finally get busy animating next week. I can't wait!

I've also recruited my best friend Noah Conti to help out as well. Check out his work here:  Pixel Epic.  Wallace is busy working on some other stuff so Noah will be doing the Zbrush work on our other two characters which I've already finished the low rez mesh of.  He'll also be doing our lighting and rendering if all goes to plan.

I'm excited to have two more artists join up.  Welcome to the team Noah and Tiru!

Evolution of the Characters

I wanted to show the evolution of our main characters from a quick doodle to the final 3D model they became.

Here is that quick doodle on the left.  I drew it to show Wallace the idea for the characters and the short.


On the right is a much better sketch that Michael did for us to flesh out the design a bit more. 
This is where I started with the modeling in Maya.

 This one is the first finished model I came up with.  His eyes were large and he had a nose like in the drawing. 

The first decision to deviate from the original drawing was the elimination of the nose.  Wallace and I both liked him better without one.  It makes his face less human and cuter as well I think.

The next major change we made was to his eyes.  As I said in a previous post I saw a commercial with characters with tiny little eyes and they looked really cute.  I didn't go as far with this character but making the eyes smaller really made a difference we liked.  I also tapered the limbs, a great suggestion Wallace had made.  This is the model I passed on to Wallace to take into Zbrush.

Along with tweaking the features of the face, one of the best details Wallace made to the characters was the folds he added to the top and bottom like a real piece of dynamite.  Even though we didn't want to make them look realistic, these details really help sell that they are sticks of dynamite and not just cylinders.  As you can see his feet are still very generic and I thought we might keep them that way (kinda like the M&M characters).  But Wallace surprised me and created these amazing shoes for them.

Below are a few views of the shoes.  They really stand out and definitely add character to these guys.  Click on the photos and check out the details he put in them.  Really great stuff! The difference in color is also one of the ways we differentiated the two so viewers can more easily tell them apart.

More on that below.

We needed to create differences other than the shoes.  A lot of that became textural.  Wallace made Boom dirtier.  He is missing a tooth and has freckles. His body is also slightly paler.  Even with all these subtle changes we wanted something a bit more drastic.





Wallace had the idea of giving one of them glasses.  Here is Boom wearing the glasses but after discussing it we both decided that Bang looked better in them.

So after two weeks of hard work in Zbrush, Wallace finished these great characters.  Like I said in the previous post, we definitely spent a lot longer on the characters than we had planned but in the end it was definitely worth it.  Here is the final Bang and Boom.

Characters complete

They took a little longer than we expected but our main character models are finally finished.

It's my pleasure to introduce you to dynamite buddies Bang & Boom!

Wallace went above and beyond in Zbrush what we originally envisioned and really made these guys shine. From the details of the body, to the shoes, and the features that differentiate the two. I'm posting this from my phone since I'm on a trip with my family but I'll add more photos of the details as soon as I can. In the meantime, I hope you like your first glimpse of Bang & Boom.