Peter 'Morphy' Renders

Here are some expression tests of the main character of our short 'Staged'. Dennis Moellers (director, animator), Chris Sulzbach (modeling), Justin Thomas (animation) and Piero Macgowan (concept artist) have been working on this together.

I based the morph targets off the Morphy Rig by Josh Burton. These test poses are based off of a 2d-cel character sheet of Flynn from 'Tangled'. I wanted to see if I could hit the same poses with my rig. The textures are wip and the hair is untextured.

This was the process:

I wasn't getting the sort of strong facial poses I'd been seeing in 3d movie characters with my original morphs. So I took the morphy base head and changed it's shape to match my main character (Peter). Chris Sulzbach created the original model of Peter. I copied the Peter shaped Morphy model and changed the topology to get the sharpness of the nose/brow and added Peter's ears and neck. Chris Sulzbach finalized this new model, making sure it was smoothed out and pushed some shapes. Then I skinwrapped the new model to the Peter-shaped Morphy model and extracted each morph. I had to redo the brows from scratch but 90% of the other morphs worked. Lastly I went through and cleaned up each morph to work for Peter's stretched shape, which took 2-3 weeks. The whole process took about 2 months in my spare time.

Dennis Moellers - dmoellers@gmail.com