Monthly Update: April 2021
We’re in the thick of it now. Yes sir, finally all of my various side ventures and going ons have been settled, and it’s time to get down to business. It’s been a bit of a touch and go month, as far as the project has been concerned. While I’ve been working on it as much as I ever have been, the animation aspect has taken a temporary back seat over the last month. I believe I mentioned in my last entry that I was using this time to really spruce up Kaelis, particularly her face. So in the last month I remodeled her face and repainted her materials from the ground up, including a new pass at her hair. One of my initial style goals was to avoid strand hair, either faked or actually simulated, because quite honestly I didn’t want to deal with it. I’m not an FX artist by trade, and I didn’t want to get bogged down in that side of things. I spend enough time just simulating capes. But as the project evolved so did the style, and I found a solution that allowed for simple, good looking hair that can utilize the tools within Unreal for simulation.
You can see in the header image the evolution of the style of Kaelis, and in a way the evolution of the style of the project itself. Initially I was going for this kinda chunky look for the hair and the character, but those changed pretty much immediately. The v1 on the left is the face placeholder I made, since her face was still never intended to be seen until Part V. But if you recall she had a very blocky look to her, which after the pilot I updated to make her more recognizably feminine. And after looking at v3 for the better part of a year, I had collected so many ideas of improvements. And as I said, now is the time for that.
I also believed I mentioned my wife is helping me out on this one. My wife is an artist at Disney Animation, and as such knows a thing or two about good facial rigs. And so while the face rig I had made for the v3 rig was fine, it could be a lot stronger. So she’s working on that as we speak. Once that’s completed, I’m going to go back into the body rig and make some minor adjustments. I want to add in some deformation blend shapes to her jacket so when she contorts it wrinkles and bends, just to give her a bit more life overall. I also want to update her pauldron slightly, and make it a little easier to work with. So, she’s aiming to be back in action very soon, hopefully in a week or two.
In the meantime, I’ve been doing a variety of other stuff. On the weekends, my main time to animate, I’ve begun the most complex and action heavy part of the episode. Asier, the creature with the mask, is leading this dance, so to speak, so I’ve been focusing more on his side of the battle for the time being, and using the “old” Kaelis rig, with the intent of swapping her out for the new rig when it’s ready. This weekend I intend to film a lot of reference footage to help with some of the moments of the fight. I’m a big proponent of filming as much footage for reference as possible. I noticed a few years back the quality of my animation jumped considerably when filming reference for even the tiniest of actions.
On the weekdays, my more chill time, I’ve been applying the new style updates to some other characters who haven’t made an appearance yet. I would post an image, but it’s still a work in progress, and also the old face kind of just looks dumb in comparison. In the mean time, I’ll leave you with this:
This is a quick screenshot of a new hand material I whipped up last week for said unintroduced character. You can see the new version on the right is generally more detailed and rich now compared to the somewhat smooth and cartoonish nature of the one on the left. These characters were made several months back, probably around the time I was animating Part II, so they were long out of date, style wise.
After I finish up the new Kaelis rig it’s full steam ahead on animation until hopefully the very end. At that point, as previously mentioned, I’ll be doing a full remastering of the series utilizing everything I’ve learned, and hopefully utilizing better hardware. My last two weeks have been busy with family and other activities, but for the next long while I finally can just hunker down and animate. The next three shots represent a significant animation hurdle, and once I get over that it’ll be smooth sailing until the end of the episode (though I’m sure I’ll think otherwise when I get there). At this point I don’t have any kind of estimate, but I can’t imagine the episode coming out sooner than maybe late June. As per usual, I’ll keep you posted. I still would like to post some more about the universe in here sometime. Once the rig stuff gets settled, that’ll probably be my new weekday activity. Until then, I have some capes to simulate.
Alex
