Blend Shapes, Colour Experimentation and Paint Weighting

It took all day but I set up the blend shapes. Pocahontas' were much easier as her face is like a cilp on mask. This is similar to how Sally was done in the Nightmare Before Christmas. Cornelius was a bit more difficult since I discovered that some vertices were not merged properly, so I had to go back and re-merge them. The first few drawings here are just sketches of what expressions I might model.


These are what the blend shapes finally look like.

I then decided to do some colour experiments. I drew these two pictures first as templates and then photocopied them and painted them with watercolours.

For Pocahontas, I just tried different colour variations of hair, clothes and skin. Skin is a very difficult colour to get right, especially when you have only 10 different watercolours. I don't think she looks good with blond or red hair. So brown or black hair. Eyes work if they are black or green. Clothes are best if they are contrasting primaries, so no patterns or mixed tones. She looks nicer pale skinned too. Personally I like the top-left one, which is closest to the colours she is now, but the one right of it, just need to change the eyes to green, and in the bottom left corner of the page could work too.
For Cornelius, I think black eyes work best. The one in the middle row to the left is more of how gorillas are actually coloured, which is a bit boring. Blue I don't think works too well. either. I like my original chocolate colour of course, but I like the strong contrast of the black and light brown of the one next to it. The one in the bottom row to the middle could also work too. For the moment however I think I will keep both models as they are.
Paint-Weighting, I hate Paint-Weighting. It's so fiddly and it relies so much on trial and error which eats up time. Pocahontas was skinned with a Drop-off rate of 0.4 and Cornelius with a Drop-off rate of 0.6. This made Pocahontas' belly deform when she rotated on her hips, moved her arms or her legs, so I tried to go in and reduce the drop-off rate to each joint by paint-weighting. Unfortunately, I think something went wrong, (I probably did it too low) because when she moved, the model just broke up into sharp fragments. I going to have to do it again. I hoped to start animating by next week, so I would like to get this problem done and soon.

What I hope to do with the animation

I hope that I will have rigs that are capable of animating well. I am thinking of doing a few short animation tests, a walk cycle for each character and a short scene showing the characters interacting with each other (no dialogue obviously).

I was thinking for this scene that I could have Pocahontas mimicking Cornelius. Cornelius would be a bit perplexed about this and Pocahontas would be enjoying herself.

I have been thinking about the benchmarks that my work could be marked against. Any good animation and character design could form a good benchmark.

For the Character Design, I was thinking that Chris Sanders (Lilo and Stitch). If my character designs could evoke a child-like wonderment like his did in Lilo and Stitch I would be happy.

(These are taken from the Art of Chris Sanders website)

I also think the character designs of Stephen Silver (Kim Possible, Danny Phantom) are good too. He really uses life drawing well. (Taken from his blog)

Other people I admire are Craig McCracken, Bruce Timm, Chuck Jones and of course Fred Moore, the definative Mickey animator.

I was also thinking about Gromit and any of the character designs in that Tom Bancroft book I already mentioned. I have been using that to help me character design so his work in that should form a good benchmark.

For the animation, any good animation would do as a benchmark. If I could animate as good as Glen Keane does right here, I would be ecstatically happy.




This is an example of top quality animation done in a very short amount of time. Amazing.

Here is another example of just how great Glen Keane is.

Here are some more pencil tests. John Lounsbery, animation of King Louie and a dancing Bugs Bunny by Ken Harris.

Here is Andreas Deja, a great Disney animator, talking about the legend of Disney animation, Frank Thomas.

However, these seam rather lofty goals to reach. I, myself, would be ecstatically happy with a standard similar to the animation coming out of Les Gobelins.

These are the short of benchmarks I am setting for myself. I am not sure I will ever be able to achieve them but I will sure try.

Research

Recently I have bought this Character Design book by Tom Bancroft. In it he states the first step to good character design is to create the basic shapes from the character descriptions and do lots of research into what you want to draw.

So the first thing I did was create the basic shapes below. For Cornelius the description states he is civilised and sensible, so he is probably very restrained and proud. If you look at silver back mountain gorillas (I chose a mountain gorilla because they have darker and furrier coats), they are very powerful. However, it also states that he is middle aged, so I thought it might be a bit funny if he had got a bit fat and bald in his old age.

For Pocahontas, she's about seven and more relaxed. She therefore probably takes her time, doesn't overexert herself. Big Point here, she wants to be a gorilla. In my mind, if she wants to be a gorilla, maybe that could be shown by allowing her to move like a gorilla. I am going to experiment with making her arms a bit longer and more gorilla like.

There is a lot of research coming up so sorry if it is a bit much.

When I decided to go this route, the first thing I decided to do was research up gorillas. Adult male gorillas a saddle of silver-hair appears on their backs. This hair is really short whilst their arm hair is really long. They reach about 5-6 ft in height, have an arm span of about 7ft 6in and weigh approximately 450-500lbs.

(These images were obtained from wikipedia)
Gorillas move around by Knuckle walking where they walk around on all fours with the weight resting on the Intermediate Phalanges. I have a diagram here to explain.
I also decided as part of my research to look up animations. I felt that Disney's Tarzan was my best bet for gorilla animation. Glen Keene's animation of Tarzan in that film was so cool and Young Tarzan will form a good basis for Pocahontas Billams. The Claymation style wanted in the brief I believe is more of a Plasticine feel gotten through the texturing stage, rather than the character design stage. Claymation doesn't mean you have to have the Aardman mouth. These Images come from either Disney's Tarzan Special Collector's Edition book or http://theartofglenkeane.blogspot.com/2006/05/tarzan.html.

I have also got some scans of drawings by Andreas Deja of Lilo, obtained from the book Lilo and Stitch: Collected stories from the film's creators. Lilo has that relaxed feeling required for Pocahontas and she is just the cutest little girl in an animated film.