ChickenHare and the Hamster of Darkness is out !!! (for a while now...)
The key location of these screenshots is the Obstacle Course where the hero must prove himself,
The design process of this element of the movie is cool so I’m sharing it on this post !
All of it is : Nwave Properties
(Be careful some videos of the article are not readable from the tumblr App, I don’t know how)
CHH:
I was working as a set designer for this project,
Cool landscapes and forgotten ruins were the things I was asked to design for the movie.
But not only!
The main task I was assign to, was to design an Obstacle Course.
In the story, the main character has to go through an army-like obstacle course to reach his final goal,
Through this course, in the script, He has to :
1-Use a machete to cut his way through a dense jungle,
2-Use his whip to lasso a branch and jump/swing over a swamp
3-Use an unstable rope bridge to cross a huge pit
But following the story needs, the obstacle course location, a simple flat field, turned into a volcano’s crater. Or to put it in a nutshell, a bottomless hole. The classic Obstacle Course didn’t fit anymore in the movie.
That’s when I started the job and was asked to find a solution with the director for the movie’s staging.
Here the process on how the Obstacle Course was designed to fit the movie needs.
1. Understanding what the team is looking for :
First thing first, making sure, you and the director are on the same vision.
Quickly I produced really ugly-rough 3D sketches to start an exchange with the director and understand better his stagings intention (and also to take out all of the parasite-idea from my mind):
Is it an acrobatic prince of persia-like parkour you are looking for ? Or some mechanical moving stairs like in harry potter?
Or some really advanced technology obstacle course with evolving environment? …
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After a few trials with the director, the evolving environment’s idea is appealing to him but with a concept constantly coming back in his vision: conveyor belt.
Just to be sure, a new 3d rough blocking is made : an evolving environment on a conveyor belt
Jackpot ! This idea is locked, we can start to think of the shape more precisely and start to care about the details.
2. Setting the motion design :
So now, we know what container we want: a transforming conveyor belt taking the shape of an obstacle course!
What we have is … just a really lame 3d blocking. Time to detail a bit more the whole thing!
Talking with the director, we locked 4 obstacles on this obstacle course conveyor belt for his staging:
-Going through the jungle with your machete,… The moving Forest Obstacle
-Using your whip to lasso a branch and jump over the Sea Obstacle
-Steep wall climbing ….The Mountain Obstacle
-And the final touch : Crossing the bottomless pit on an unstable rope bridge.
For each of these obstacles plenty of problems appeared :
How these obstacles will unfold on a conveyor belt? What will be their scale compared to the character? What mechanisms are inside the machine? ….
Again, a serie of rough 3D blocking are made to block the ideas with the team. Here a quick look at them:
Everthing was a process of repetition of trials and error until the director felt confortable with the Obstacle course.
After the ideas got approved, we put everything in one scene, and went for the next step of the design.
The summary of all the 3d researches for the staging/design put together :
Once everything has been set up, we had a solid base to go to the next step :
Making a visual design.
3. Setting the visual design :
Everything that was not clear enough in 3d (everything) was redrawn with more ideas and details so that the rest of the team had a solid base to build this asset.
Here not many explanations are needed, the pictures speak by themselves:
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Some IKEA likes set up graphics, plans to understand better which substance are used on what, what the global layout will be, how the obstacles are thought ….
After that, more visual design work;
What will be around the obstacle course, how the musicians will look like, what will be on the flags and what is the overall arena made of ….
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Based on all of this, we made an exchange with the storyboard team to stage the sequences hapening there, add more details where it was needed and put everything in 3D layout. After that my job was done; I will discover the final result next year when the movie will come out.
It was a great challenge to do. Scary before starting, exciting while doing it and then a fulfilling feeling after making it!
The director, storyboard and layout team were such a great source of advices in this work, I would never have made it without them, and I thank them for this really cool experience!
More experimentation on character drawing!
Inspired from Scroll, Andrea and Ashe (again!) from webnovel “release that witch”
Character description below :
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Andrea is a peerless sniper, she’ll never miss the mark. She can stay in hiding for days, even weeks until her prey come out.
She loves gambling.
Ashe is incredibly strong and usually stays at the front lines where her boldness shows out.
She loves gambling with Andrea.
Scroll has outstanding memory, she can memorise any writing she read. She never appears on the field as her skills let her bring out her true potential of strategist behind a desk.
She does not partake in any gambling session.
Fleshing out some character of Release That Witch : ASHE
I’m trying to design some of the characters of the web novel Release That witch, I want to start with Ashe, Extraordinary Witch, possessing super human strenght, she is a true warrior and a “act first, think later” person.
In there you have study from viking haircut, test for posing and research for the gears details.
If there is enough time I’ll make a proper illustration out of her !
Second picture on the mix 2D and 3D serie ! There is no looping and lot of things need to be pushed, I may correct them later, and everything i real time/playblasted .... Will do more, more simple, but later...
Butterfly and fish (can you see them ?) from acornbringer pack And cat model from David o’reilly pack
(Normally their name should link to their website ....)
A quick joke/sketch, to say … Well, This place is still alive, I had busy time, and now I’ll take care of it more often!
PS: We are getting close to 500 persons following this blog. For some people it can seems little, to me it looks gigantic! Thank you for taking the time to look at the posted things and to follow me, have a nice day!
The movie made by my friend is finaly out !
here some part of the researches I made with them, it’s thanks to the whole team participation that we manage to create them !
An Idea Thought at school but finally couldn’t be made because of time, so I did it home,
There are plenty of references of differents movies and anime hidden inside of the drawing you can try finding them if you have the time !
A little something, made for someone’s special day :)
Was never used in the end, maybe it can be used for some other special occasion ?
Made with 100% maya ;)
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