#walking-backwards

[monsterfoundry]

So! These are the two characters for my ‘Walking Backwards’ project. I’m reasonably happy with the Ghost, she’s pretty much how I imagined her, but I’m having trouble with the Kid. I keep making them look too old, even the more final one here makes them look a little older than I’d like. They’re supposed to be ten.

These are not final designs, they are mostly so I have basic designs to work with for thumbnailing. So that’s my next job, thumbnailing out the pages, and we’ll see where we go from there.

If you want to read the script you can read it here.

[monsterfoundry]

New Project - Walking Backwards

So hey! I'm going to try doing something new-ish.

As usual, I've gotten lost in preproduction, planning, software aquisition and training, and I haven't been actually, you know, working on Things.

For years, literally years now, I've been wanting to do a 3D comic. My original plan for my adventure All Night Laundry was to do it in 3D, but I couldn't figure out a way to get myself to work on it consistently, so I just jumped in feet first and started drawing it. That's worked pretty well, but I still wanna do a 3D comic dammit!

So I'm going to try to do that thing.

Buuut to keep myself honest and/or motivated I'm going to do it as a sort of open project. I'll be posting the script tomorrow and I'll be talking about what I'm doing, why, and how, here on tumblr.

All Night Laundry still comes first, and I have a finite amount of energy and enthusiasm, so I will probably not be doing updates every day, but I'm going to try to update at least three times a week.

That means this somewhat moribund tumblr is being resurrected, but not as a re-blog machine, which is how I've traditionally used tumblr. Instead it will contain just my daily updates from All Night Laundry, as well as the updates and posts for this new project. They'll all be flagged as 'walking-backwards', as that is the working title for this new project.

Hope this goes well!

[monsterfoundry]

All right! 

So this was an interesting process. The link to the post with the script is here, in case you want to follow along.

I’ve never really thumb-nailed a comic before, so this was a new experience for me. I found that I really had to concentrate on doing this. It wasn’t particularly hard exactly, but it required my whole concentration. 

The parts I found difficult were mainly in determining the scale of panels. I mostly used a nine panel grid, which I tend to really like in comics, and fit the number of panels I’d scripted pretty well. 

In the first page, I had to add two panels, a shot of the sky and then a shot of the kid in profile. This stretches out a moment, which I like, but they’re mainly there to make the panels fit. 

I added a panel to page 2 as well, though I like that one better. I extend the moment of approach, when the ghost is walking towards the camera. I wanted to increase menace, and it fit the nine panel grid, so that all worked out nice and tidy.

The only other change from the script was that I welded the shots in page three when the kid is coming out of the bodega together. I wanted extra space to give that one, and I didn’t really feel it needed the two separate beats.

Overall, this was an interesting experience, but a challenging one... which is what I’m looking for in this project, so go me!

Tomorrow I’m probably going to lay out my entity list. Now that I have it laid out, I can go through each panel and list the stuff I’m going to need to build in 3D. There’s... more than I thought, mainly in terms of buildings in the first page. I’m going to need to build at least three houses in some detail...

Anywho! See you tomorrow!

[monsterfoundry]

Not dead yet

So I have been just exhausted for the last... while, and I’m not sure why. I have not given up, but damn this is going slowly. I am worried about the blockout because... I’m not sure, I think mostly because it’s that transition point from planning to doing, and that point is always a source of considerable anxiety for me.

So while I have not yet done my blockout (getting close to two weeks now) I did learn how to use two nodes in Houdini.

Each node in Houdini is sort of like a little box of tricks. They all have a ton of little dials and widgets and it takes a while to figure out all how all of it works.

So today I learned how to use ‘lattice’ and ‘ray’, both of which are going to be really handy. I also want to investigate how their muscle system does subdermal deformations. 

Oh! I also saw a really cool facial rig on youtube today... where’d I put that link:

Aha!

Check this out? This is a really clever facial rig done in three layers. I hadn’t considered building anything that way, as I work in video games and holy butts can we not afford anything close to this complexity in real-time, but for an animation rig? This is really nice.

My characters won’t have anything approaching this level of complexity, at least at first, but this is still something I’m going to be studying, if I ever do something longer in the future.

[monsterfoundry]

I understand poser comics better now

So! Here’s the asset list for Walking Backwards. It looks pretty scary.

This is why a lot of people just buy assets for 3D comics. Look at this list. This is the asset inventory for a five page comic.

foliage

trees

sure are a lot of these

can I make these proceduraly in houdini?

yes

brushes

tall grass

bushes

surfaces

road

can I do procedural cracks?

grass

need a grass solution

can I also do this in houdini? probably

park path

don't want to make this particularly complex

characters

the kid

maybe give them ears on their hat?

the ghost

small props

pumpkin

plant pots

carton of milk

cans

cereal boxes

jars

medium props

cars

street light

park lamp-post

park bench

park garbage can

bodega interior shelves

bodega counter-top

bodega exterior shelves

buildings

kids house

we only see the front

porch

randomized houses

porch and stairs

low poly

don't need to do too much here

street with houses

lots of low-quality houses

bodega

Now, my original plan was to do all this in blender, but the foliage and the houses are pushing me to do this in Houdini. 

That’s still maybe not the best plan. There’s only three or four houses I actually show clearly, and I’m doing this in a low-complexity style so it might be possible to just do precisely what I need and nothing more.

The thing that’s pushing me towards Houdini is the foliage. Houdini is primarily a special effects software, but it’s also good for procedural generation for meshes. 

I’m interested in learning how to do this for my day-job, so I might do it here. While it’s conceptually plausible for me to manually construct all the assets for this project, any larger project would rapidly eclipse the scope of what I could set up manually.

So I’m thinking Houdini for everything.

[okayen]

✉ ✔✦

hello!