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

Stage Concept Art

Here is the stage concept by Piero Macgowan. Cant wait to get this modeled and lit!!

Here's a link to Piero's Blog:

http://pieroartist.blogspot.com/

Peter with some updates

Peter has been updated with a new rig that will allow for better morphs.  here's the new head model w/ UVs and the prototype skin shader that i am working up.

The above image is the new UV layout for peter. this will allow maximum resolution on the face area.

This is a skin shader that i am working on in mental ray. you can see the red checkers blend out into skin. the idea is that i will create a procedural skin shader that blends into the actual UV mapped one. i will start with the procedural one as the base of the texture so they will seamlessly blend together. this is just experimental as of right now.

this image has the mr sss fast skin + shader that i downloaded from zap's. it has reflection built into the shader. it looks cool, but i prefer the classic mr sss fast skin.

This is the mr sss fast skin shader on peter. i am currently working on the shader when i don't feel like sculpting, like tonight!


- Chris Sulzbach

We all live in a yellow sulzerine

Well its been a damn long while since i put up some art, but its summer and after the iAnimate gig i needed a bit of a break. i've started texturing peter, since then, and am starting to get a pretty cool skin result. this is still obviously WIP (no spec, temp bump, not final diffuse) but i am mixing texture maps with procedurals so i can get pretty close with the camera without loss of quality. they still need tweaking, but its a cool idea to go forward with. i am also diving into composite materials, which are the shit.

check out these quick images.

I've also made a few custom brushes in p-shizzle, for things like freckles and pores. check out a freckle brush. its properties are scattery and opacity pretty simple.

- Chris Sulzbach

There isn't much that i feel i need

Here's an update on carmen. i UVed her head tonight as well as made some proportion changes to her body per dennis.

I don't think this is her final UV as i still want to attach the inner eye to the eyelid as well as adjust the throat sock.

and a greyscale AO shot.

- Chris Sulzbach

Plugged in and Ready to Fall

Got about an hour tonight to work some more on carmen. i am starting to like her more and more. i do need to take her into zbrush 1 more time to see if i can fix the corners of the mouth a bit, flatten out the bottom of the nose, and generally give a smoothing pass overall.

Tomorrow i'll take care of the zbrush pass and then send her off to dennis for a little spot check.


On a side note, at work i've been really refining my projection process for normals/ambient occlusion and i will post some tutorials later on as i work on the bust for the contest we're holding. there have always been parts of the 3d asset creation process that i've thought to be tedious and boring that i've kind of switched around to liking more and more. uvs and projection are great examples of that. i think it is especially gratifying once you get a really solid process down that consistently produces bad ass results. i'll elaborate further on this crap later, but i just thought i'd mention it for no other reason than shits and/or giggles.

- Chris Sulzbach

Sultry Fleshiness

The head is about where i want it. i had a great critique with piero who actually did a bit of sculpting on the mesh which really helped it alot. i stayed a bit late at work today just putting the final touches on her and i'm really happy and so is ol' dendrils. i'm heading home now to get my body proxy mesh and continue forward on getting that fleshed out. here's my leaving work update and i'll post another later tonight.

- Chris Sulzbach

Peter UVs and base textures applied

Now begins the texturing process, WOOO!

- Chris Sulzbach

Peter Bounce Anim Test - Final

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFbrD0Auurs

Here is the final animation pass for the bounce test!

Peter Bounce Anim Test - Stepped

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J_lTmpSESs

Here is the blocking stage of a test animation for Peter. I used stepped keys to focus only on poses.

Peter Walk Cycle

I've been away from actually animating for a while with all of the facial and body rigging. So I decided to start back with a walk cycle tutorial from Chris Kirshbaum from Gnomon Workshop. This walk cycle is meant to be a simple, non-personality walk. Next I will edit the walk a few times to give it a lot of personality for Peter on stage, sad in the back alley or drunk on stage.

Since I've used character studio for such a long time it was great to learn more about editing curves for smooth animation. Peter's rig is a highly edited CAT rig by a great rigger - John Stewart. The rig uses euler curves for rotation instead of Quaternion like Character Studio.

Animation Has Begun!

Feelin Good! The 1st draft of Peter's rig is finished and I have been doing some animation tutorials to get back up to speed. I'm very excited to be animating again. It will be my mission during the rest of the film to animate a majority of the time instead of rigging, modeling, editing, etc. I will post some animation tests soon!

Peter's Rig To-Do List

- Make sure there are no other joint changes. - DONE
o Pelvis - DONE
o Knee - DONE
o Shoulders - DONE
o Upper Leg - DONE
o Ankle - DONE

- Edit Skeleton rig to match new Center of Mass, knees, etc. - DONE

- Use script to reproportion the rig to Peter -DONE
o Change Center of Mass here - DONE

- Hook up all Twist/Bendy Bones on right side to see if everything works, especially the legs with the twist bones.
o Arms - DONE
o Legs - DONE

- Add Toe bones - DONE
- Add Knuckle bones - DONE
- Add Spine skin-to bones - DONE
- Add Neck bones - DONE
- Skin entire character - DONE
- Add Tie bones - 2nd Draft
- Add Suspender bones - 2nd Draft

- Merge morph head with rig - 2nd Draft
- Add Hair bones - 2nd Draft
- Link up eye targets - 2nd Draft
- Skin the morph head - 2nd Draft

- Animate!!!

Final Jameson Concept

Piero finished up the concept for Jameson - cant wait to animate this guy! I think it will fit perfectly with the voice we recorded.

Facial Morph Renders

Here are some renders of facial poses Justin Thomas did with Peter's face rig:

Jameson Concept Almost Finished

Piero has just a few more tweaks to do to the character, and then some cleanup. Any other Crits?

Facial Morphs FINISHED!

I just finished fixing up the morphs and then hooking them up to the joysticks! It was a long process, but I think the results are fantastic. I will post some tests soon. Now, onto the body rig!

SHAZAM!

Justin is making his first official Blog Post.
...And the earth tilted slightly off its axis.

Salinger, your time is Up!

Piero Macgowan, a friend and excellent concept artist at Firaxis is getting Jameson's concept figured out. I photoshopped Peter and Jameson together to see how it feels. I had to shrink Jameson's head a little to make him work with Peter. What do you think?

Facial Morph Fixes

This is what I have left to do on Peter's face before I move to the body. I think I will be done sometime next week.

PinchCorner morphs - DONE
Sneer EyeLid Fix - DONE
Sneer Four directions - DONE
Low eye lid prog morphs - DONE
Mouth Move out / in - DONE
Upper lip inner spikes - DONE
Fix Out Smile Inner Lips - DONE
Fix Mid Smile Inner Lips - DONE
Fix In Smile Inner Lips - DONE
Fix Wide Inner Lips - DONE
Fix Out Frown Inner Lips - DONE
Fix Mid Frown Inner Lips - DONE
Fix In Frown Inner Lips - DONE
Better Upper Lip Curl Out - DONE
Better Upper Lip Curl In - DONE
Better Lower Lip Curl Out - DONE
Better Lower Lip Curl In - DONE
MouthFwd - DONE
Cheeks out - DONE
Inner brow creases fix - DONE

Brow Left Right Movement - DONE
3 Extreme Smile Morphs - DONE

TO BE DONE WITH RIGGING:
Eyeball morphs
Teeth Mover Bones
Nose bone and look-at
Fleshy eyelids