Maria Andrea Acosta, 23, Colombian.
A SCAD anim alumn's blog for processes and sketches.
Currently a PA for Kuku Studios for unnanounced NF movie
Contact at [email protected]
So, I’m not a rigger, but I did take a basic rigging class and our hands were short. It felt great to do something different and touch back on old lessons, even if the end result wasn’t very smooth. It’s very flawed, but Jackie Geiger encouraged me to share the results.
The Bag was designed by Cat Bedell, modeled by Megan McLauren and textured by Rachael Ormond. It starts with a root joint at the top of the band, which is the parent of two FK Chains at the top. The bag's joints aren't connected under them to allow independent motion. A sticky constraint was aided by Jackie to make the bag's independent movement influence the end joints of the bag.
More under the cut.
The structure is united by control hierarchy and constraining of groups containing controllers. That way, every control can be keyed by the animator without any frozen values. Here one of the fk joints is selected. There is a joint parented to the bag in the same position, but they are not connected. It only exists as a joint point to attach the keychain
Each of those triangle can move the joint under, and each pair is parented to the “ribbons” in the middle. Scaling them made the smaller controls move and shrink or expand, making adjustment of the bag posible.
Now, on the leash.
The leash was modeled by Shaunna Proffit. It has independent structures at the top and the bottom for independence of the ends. IK handles and orient constraints are used on the leash hook to move its parts around. A ribbon + blendshape setup allows for control of the band's curvature.
I’m personally proud of the accidental mixed system of the hook. Though I didn’t intend it so, making a pole vector and parenting things a certain way made movement of the hook dynamic, while still connected to the leash geommetry.
The only unfortunate detail is that the leash is not as smooth in bend as it could be. It needed one ribbon joint to be more malleable, but time constraints forced us to move on and improvise with what we had.
Sadly, the geometry of the leash band had an extreme to which it could bend, and even with more joints it was impossible to not reveal the inside faces. A more advanced method of rigging was probably what this prop needed, but I’m not trained enough to know.
At the end, we had to decide to make the leash be stashed away for the rest of the film and take advantage of a time cut to imply so. Some things are better this way.
Hey! This is a complex shot I made for BRAKE, a hybrid 3D-2D Thesis film. It will be available for streaming the 25h of May of 2021, 7pm est in this link!
If you’re curious, I’m breaking down the development process under the cut.
First, the roughs were made over two painstaking weeks, or three? But a 3D reference was needed first to get a grasp of the tracking without too much struggle.
With the roughs done, I progressed the cleanup and passed the coloring to Cat Bedell, asking them to only color certain frames and to leave me some to handle, since the distortion of Linx’s body features would need to be tracked and animated.
In pre-production, the goop surrounding Linx went from originally flat to very colored. Progression of my color key to Aja’s color key, which meant many colors to track. I had a keyframe rough of different saved in case we had time to animate them. Because they were many and the film’s upcoming needs looked compromising, I used different layers to animate colors one by one, in order of bottom to top. Going by every group of dots made things flow much faster.
I separated the goop by front and back layers, as the forms shift and rotate behind Linx and then exist in front of him. I had to be very careful selecting and dividing what I had animated.
With all done, I had to arrange and render separate layers as frame sequences. I brougth them all together in after effects, grouped the front and back together and made the major goop shapes the mask.
In a separate toon boom harmony scene, I made Linx’s colors be the orange of the change. On after effects, a simple transparency made the illusion of a change!
I find the idea she held the hearts together while they were rescued to be very interesting. It’d be neat if the heart of light power was explained further
Hello! I got really busy doing animation studies in school so I dropped this blog, but things in life are changing and I need to reach new frontiers so I’m gonna be more active again. In the meantime I’ll post old doodles I didn’t post here. This one looks like this because it was made on an ipad
I don’t know the week prompts, but I hope a certain niche is having fun!
turnnoffyourmind
kaledo-art
origamiaround
baratheonpilled
yousharknotpass
ellievsbear