Together at Last

Here are the two characters, Pocahontas and Cornelius, finally together in the same scene. I haven't done the secondary animation yet, hair etc, and I haven't animated the heads yet. The reason is that Jared suggested that create a little personality movie out of these two walking next to each other, giving each other looks etc. So I mocked up the rough storyboard and timing you see below.
So I needed both characters in the scene before I could animate their heads cause I needed to judge where their heads should look. I just got to figure out how to use the trak editor.

On the plus side, they do look quite nice together.

Animation Research and Early Tests

Hello, I have finally started animating. Unfortunately I won't be able to do the personality sequence in time for the deadline but I hope to at least do walkcycles for both characters. Below is some of the research I have done based on those two gorilla walkcycles from YouTube I placed in a previous post.

Here is a video from Youtube aof a gorilla walking from it's side. It's perfect.

I have also looked at a BBC Horizon documentary called "Chimps are People Too?" I was very interesting. Here is a piece of it. Unfortunately, embedding has been disabled so here is a link instead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2NnqHVBpmQ

Here are some quick thumbnail drawings I have done to figure out the timing. Here are just the keyframe walkcycles for both Pocahontas and Cornelius. I was kinda limited in their walkcycles by their designs.

Test

This is just a test to see if the models and rigs work and if the characters look good together.

Update and First Test Animation

Well I finally have some good news. After re-modelling and re-rigging the models, they no longer crumple up when they move. Hooray. As you can see from the rigs below it took some moving around of the joints and adding extra joints in fat areas to take some of the weight strain. Mainly these joints were place on the belly joints, fat wrist twists and the knees, but in Cornelius he also has some on the shoulders as well. There is still some minor paint-weighting to be done but nothing serious like it was before. I like to thank Mike, Alex, Jared, Louisa, Mo and especially Harry for all the help. It has really been appreciated. Finally things are moving.



I have also done some test quadrupedal animation using the 21 frame walk guide on pages 330 and 331 of Richard William's Animators Survival Kit. I tried to download a dog rig from Highend 3D but it didn't work on my Maya 8.5, so I used the bloke rig from CVA 201. Animating the arms was hard as they were FK. Obviously more personality needs to be in the actual walks for the characters but this is a good first try.

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.

Skeletal Rigging

Right, I think I have finished the rigging part. I have been using Alex's tutorials and the "Learning Maya 7" book.




For Cornelius, because he has to walk on all fours, I decided to do the arms IK as well as the legs. It isn't as good for posing as FK but should help me when he has to walk. I set up the reverse foot locks for both the feet and I have created finger bending controillers to bend the fingers more easily, following Alex's tutorials. His beard is an IK spline curve as I didn't want to have to move it all joint by joint. This way all I have to move is the vertices of the curve. I hope, once he is skinned to set up a jiggle deformer on the belly so I don't have to worry about rigging the belly up too much. The eyes have also been set up with a locator too.



For Pocahontas, her rig is quite similar to Cornelius', as she too has to walk on all fours. She has lots of splines curves in her hair. She has been rigged up with ik arms and legs, reverse foot locks, finger bending controls and an eye setup.

I am going to do the blend shapes next before I skin, hopefully that shouldn't take that long. I am hoping to have it all done by next week so I can start animating.

P.S.

I have posted up here this cartoon "Donald Duck and the Gorilla" (1945) for research. I know that Cornelius isn't going to be as ferocious as the gorilla in the cartoon but I like the cartoon a lot, it is superbly animated and it could help for gorilla acting.

Modelling Finished

Well, the modelling is finally finished. It took all day yesterday to finish of Cornelius and I think he looks pretty o.k. He still looks a little bit blocky, but it was very difficult to pull the vertices around to round him off. I've left it be because I am rapidly running out of time, there are only four weeks left and I have still got a lot to do. Anyway I am not specialising in modelling so it doesn't really matter so much.

I still got to rig the characters, set up blend shapes and start animating. The animation is the most important as that is the key area I really want to specialise in. I know it is going to take time to really study the animation and animate well and I am worried that I am not going to be able to animate all that I wanted.

I originally wanted to do a walkcycle for each character and a little interaction scene. I really want to make each of these really good so I know that it will take a lot of researching of gorilla movements. I may have to drop doing the personality scene, but that is really important to show. I really hope that I don't have to drop it.

I am just going to have to skip the entire texturing stage, I am not specialising in it anyway, and it will just eat up time and increase the file sizes. I am quite happy with the colours that I originally chose for each of them. I like Posahontas' jet black, gorilla like hair and peach face. She lokks a bit, colour-wise, like a baby chimpanzee. I tried to keep her clothes lightly toned too. Claymation never has harsh, vivid colour.

The problem with Cornelius is that Gorillas are usually black all over, and thats a bit boring. Looking at the book Jared let me have, and I glad I could bring some brown into his design. He looks a bit like chocolate now Still, I should probably do some colour variation sheets, but do I have the time.

Least their size comparison is what I wanted.

Pocahontas Modelling Finished and Cornelius Started

Hello, it's been a few days but I have been quite busy. A lot of work has had to be done to be kept on track of my production schedule.

The Pocahontas model had to be tweaked to make it appear more round and less blocky when it was smoothed. I pulled some vertices around, re-modelled the hair a bit and voila. All that was left were some teeth, a tongue and an inner to her mouth. I think she looks pretty good, considering that modelling isn't the area I am specialising in. For her, what is need next is for the blend shapes to be modelled, and for her to be rigged and weighted.

Corneilus has a very similar process of modelling to that of Pocahontas, except more dificult as he is larger, naked so all his fat and muscles show, and his heads a weird shape. Soon, I will give him some eyes, eyelids, tongue, teeth and an inner to his mouth. His vertices need to be pulled around a bit before he can be mirrored and smoothed, so he doesn't look as blocky. His colour was based o pictures of chimps and gorillas I got from a book called "James and other Apes" given to me by Jared. More on that in the next post.
I hope to have Cornelius finished by the end of the week, so the difficult process of rigging and blend shapes can take place.

Cornelius Model Sheets

Here are the Model Sheets for Cornelius. Personally, I am happy but not thrilled with the design, but this will have to do to keep on schedule. I think it gives off the air of a stuffy, sensible, middle-aged man so it is a success. He stands about nine heads tall (about 7 Maya units). For these, they were too big to fit on an A4 scanner so I had to scan them in bits, compose them in Paint and shrink them down. It came off quite well.

This top view was really quite difficult. It had to be scanned in and shrunk down.
I am planning, as I have previously stated, going to do a simple model and rig to start animating, and hopefully a more complicated one later on. Below is a size comparison between the two characters. this should give a idea of what it should look like later on.

Cornelius

Here are some of the Cornelius drawings I have done over the past week. These are quite early trying to get his character. In these below I tried to give him a cone head. It was funny but didn't quite seem like his character brief.

It can also get a bit creepy.
Now when I drew this round head below, something clicked and I really like it.
As I stated before, I thought it would be cool if I could put the logo for the City of London on his back. Here is an example of what it might look like.

He I was experimenting with that design, trying to get more of that Gromit look I was talking about.


I drew these to show what he might look from the front and the back.

These show the relationships between the characters of the happy, relaxed Pocahontas and the sensible, grumpy Cornelius.