My short animation, titled Squishy for want of a better name, uses models I made for the Error’s Escape project with some modifications and a completely separate storyline. The characters were modelled with little difficulty and few problems, just a lot of tweaking and time spent.
From the very beginning, I knew I wanted the characters to look squishy and slightly translucent. I achieved this using sub-surface scattering learned from a Gnomon Workshop tutorial, which proved to be easy to understand, informative and very useful. I’ve been told the characters look edible, perhaps a little like jelly babies, which seems to fit with the opinion that their eyes look like Kool Mints.
The eye texture itself was made in Photoshop, using gradients, pixilation, radial blur and an ocean ripple filter.
The problems came with the rigging stage. I found that the best way of making the eyelids able to blink was to use clusters and blend shapes, however the best tutorial on the subject of making blinking eyes was written in very broken English. Nevertheless, I forged on and gave my characters the ability to blink.
In rigging the skeleton, I ran into further issues. Originally, the characters had arms, however whenever I moved the arms, the head would deform quite markedly. After fiddling with the paint skin weights tool for a good two hours, I decided the best option was to simply cut their arms off and not worry about it any longer. This made the animating process much smoother, though not without its hiccups.
I ran into an issue near the end of the animation, where Purple stands up and turns to face Green. For reasons unknown, Purple’s rotate attributes were locked, never to be unlocked again, so I could turn neither skeleton nor skin around. To solve this problem, I hid Purple from that frame onwards, and instead imported a new, unlocked version of the character to animate. It was confusing and clunky, but worked around the problem well enough.
Green still skates a bit, but overall I’m happy enough with the walk cycle. They have no arms, are incredibly top-heavy and made out of jelly; they’re supposed to be a bit awkward as they walk, as though they haven’t quite got the hang of such actions.
In rendering, I had issues trying to find out how to use Mental Ray to render a movie file, only to find that it couldn’t. Thinking there was no way around this, I replaced all the shaders and fog lights with standard blinn shaders and regular spotlights and rendered that instead. This only took half an hour, so not too much time was wasted. I later learned how to render each frame out as an image file and stitch them together as a movie in QuickTime, and so set up a batch render. The estimated sic-hour render was extended by another four when I found the virus scanner had started halfway through, but overall it was a success.
The images were rendered as png files, which for some reason QuickTime didn’t like. The colours in the movie were entirely different to the colours in the still image files, very desaturated and with dithering to rival an animated gif. After converting all the frames to jpegs using Photoshop, the colours were fixed and no quality was lost.
Composing the soundtrack resulted in no issues, except that I’m not at all a musical person and spent much of the time scrubbing over combinations that didn’t work. However, having not done anything musical since quitting the clarinet a good ten years ago, I’m quite pleased with the outcome.
