I largely stuck with textures provided though I had to come up with the subsurface material parameters myself. Some starting texture assets were already provided for the skin. Viewport with the untextured model that better shows some of the rigging Character Skin and Eyes If you try the pose yourself, you can feel how your cheek pushes into your eye. Pushing and sort of inflating the cheek that’s resting on her hand too make it look compressed.Combining the low camera ange and a tilt in the head to accentuate irritation.Getting the gaze at just the right angle so that it’s almost a bit of an eye roll (Thanks to Leif Pederson for much needed guidance).It was also a good excuse to rewatch Big Hero 6, there’s a part where Tadashi is very tired looking (if you’ve seen it, you’ll probably know what I’m talking about) that was also a helpful resource.Ī couple of the nuances that I think really helped: My favorites are some of his character drawings in the “The Art of Big Hero 6” and “The Art of Moana”. I’d put something here but I’m not sure about what permissions are required, so you’ll have to find it yourself, I’ll wait. If you haven’t seen his work, stop what you’re doing right now and google him immediately. My biggest inspiration was the work of Jin Kim, one of the many talented animators and character designers at Disney. Animators are masters at capturing the essense and emotion of a pose and you can see that best in gesture drawings. I could have used real-life photos as a reference, but I was worried about the pose looking too stiff if I followed those too closely. I gathered a bunch of my “Art of …” books (I’ve gathered a small collection from both games and CG movies) and started pouring through a bunch of the gesture drawings. The rig could be controlled via Anim School Picker which was incredibly intuitive and generally just fun to play with.Īnim School Picker UI for the Mathilda Rigįor the posing, I wanted something Pixar/Disney-esque. Character Posingįor the challenge, they provided a Mathilda model created by Xiong Lin and rigged by Leon Sooi. Another idea was that she’d be trying to be decrypt some kind of magical artifact. Originally I had this idea of the character working on a magical computer, the pink light on the right is supposed to be a monitor.Ĭoncept Shot 2. Here’s some of my original concept shots with just the scene assets re-organized and some test lights:Ĭoncept Shot 1. That led me to experiment with a combination of cool and warm lights. But I also wanted an atmosphere of coziness and solitude, like sitting alone by a fire on a cold winter night. Meaning books everywhere as if she’d be researching in a frenzy with little regard for cleanliness. That fun little mix of insanity and frustration is what I wanted to revolve my concept around.įor the setting I had this vision of the Magic Library Trope meets a messy college dorm room. Sometimes, issues I’m trying to debug take spend days, even weeks! The worst of those bugs can drive you insane with whiteboards full of crazy theories that feels remincent of some kind of detective movie. Professionally, I spend an almost embarassing amount of time banging my head against my keyboard trying to understand why pixels look like one color and not another. Conceptįor the concept, I wanted to aim for something I could strongly relate to. The challenge is free for anyone to enter and you’ll get feedback from some of the Pixar folks as well as other people participating which was an incredible experience that I can’t reccomend enough. If you don’t like words, I won’t be offended if you want to scroll through and see some cool pictures, though my hope is it inspires some folks to give the challenge a try themself (especially those from an engineering background). This post went on longer than I expected, but hopefully it’ll give you a sense of what it took to get to the final render. I still find it a little hard to believe, but my entry ended up getting first place! I highly recommend checking out the other entries, I actually liked a lot of the other entries more than my own, honestly when I submitted my entry, I had zero expectation of even getting placed! This challenge was extra interesting because they also provided a fully rigged character model to work with, here’s what the provided scene looked like for this challenge:Īnd here’s what my final entry, titled “Midnight Meltdown” looked like (click for the full 4k image): You’re allowed to add your own VFX and modify the scene but the story-telling must revolve around the provided assets. And now for something completely different.Ī combination of this post from Yining Karl Li and a general itch to do something more artsy made me attempt something a little crazy, the RenderMan Art Challenge! The idea of challenge is to take a untextured scene and turn it into a nice final render in 90 days.
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