Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Puppets are done!
Well, I finally finished my puppet's costuming, head sanding and painting, and eye insertion. The most enjoyable thing was seeing the puppets I've been working on and planning for more than a semester finally come together into a finished product. The most difficult thing was working nonstop and skipping sleep to try to finish on schedule. Pictures below of the finished puppets, as well as some set photos.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
update
this week I've been working mainly on sanding, painting, and finishing the heads I printed out on the 3D printer. I also worked out an eye mechanism to make the pupils rotate in the skull, and fitted the two tiny magnets into each separate piece. I had a lot of fun figuring out which colors to paint the characters to make them fit the coor scheme but without needing to have extremely realistic flesh and hair tones.
Costuming is also coming along; the most difficult thing this week has been figuuring out how to make the shoes for each character; in terms of materials that need to be both flexible and tough for when I animate the walk cycles.
A lot of the feedback I got when I presented my animatic to the graduate seminar advised me that the beginning of my film was too slow, and that I should speed it up and get to the main action of the stick bug and ghost boy. This was really helpful, and should allow me to cut even more out of my animatic, making it more feasible as I am nearly but not quite on schedule for animating.
I will post pictures hopefully tonight of my progress so far, unfortunately I don't have a camera right now so I need to locate one
Costuming is also coming along; the most difficult thing this week has been figuuring out how to make the shoes for each character; in terms of materials that need to be both flexible and tough for when I animate the walk cycles.
A lot of the feedback I got when I presented my animatic to the graduate seminar advised me that the beginning of my film was too slow, and that I should speed it up and get to the main action of the stick bug and ghost boy. This was really helpful, and should allow me to cut even more out of my animatic, making it more feasible as I am nearly but not quite on schedule for animating.
I will post pictures hopefully tonight of my progress so far, unfortunately I don't have a camera right now so I need to locate one
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Update
This week I've been working extremely hard on finishing my set and completing the last stages of puppet-making. It requires a lot of various random skills that I've had to learn, like sawing very fragile wood panels, cutting through steel rods with a dremel tool (I wouldn't recommend it), and the proper application of resin to fiberglass cloth, in addition to sewing skills, clothing design and pattern knowledge, balance of color and contrast within each puppet as well as how each one fits into the color and tonal range of the set as a whole.
The most difficult thing, outside of all the physical labor, has been planning how to coordinate the color choices I would LIKE to have ideally, with the reality that certain materials only come in a limited range of colors, like a certain shade of beige for the subway seats or a certain metallic tone for the paneling on the floor. This also applies to costuming; forcing me to work around the patterns and colors of fabric I can find, rather than planning exactly what color each piece of clothing will be and then trying to find it at the fabric store, which gets really frustrating.
The most enjoyable thing this week has probably been realizing that, although I didn't get as much up-front tangible puppet and set building done over the summer as i would have liked, all the trial-and-error experimentation with materials and processes I did during that time, as well as the extensive thought and problem-solving concerning HOW I was going to build things, has helped me a lot now. It's much easier to focus on making the puppets and set look good when I don't have to worry as much about details of a specific process that's really easy to mess up, like how many times to dip latex hands or what size of square brass tubing to track down in a tiny Santa Monica craft shop.
The most difficult thing, outside of all the physical labor, has been planning how to coordinate the color choices I would LIKE to have ideally, with the reality that certain materials only come in a limited range of colors, like a certain shade of beige for the subway seats or a certain metallic tone for the paneling on the floor. This also applies to costuming; forcing me to work around the patterns and colors of fabric I can find, rather than planning exactly what color each piece of clothing will be and then trying to find it at the fabric store, which gets really frustrating.
The most enjoyable thing this week has probably been realizing that, although I didn't get as much up-front tangible puppet and set building done over the summer as i would have liked, all the trial-and-error experimentation with materials and processes I did during that time, as well as the extensive thought and problem-solving concerning HOW I was going to build things, has helped me a lot now. It's much easier to focus on making the puppets and set look good when I don't have to worry as much about details of a specific process that's really easy to mess up, like how many times to dip latex hands or what size of square brass tubing to track down in a tiny Santa Monica craft shop.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Process Description
Process in Modeling and Printing a 3-part Stop-Motion Puppet Head
1: First, I created 3 polygon primitive cubes in Maya. I drew up several model sheets of my character’s head from the front, side, top and back view, in order to give myself a frame of reference while modeling.
2: I moved and scaled these polygon cubes to correspond to the back of head, top of face, and bottom of face respectively of my character. I then scaled each of these cubes down by half, so that the left faces of each cube rested on the y-axis. This is to enable me to model both sides of the face simultaneously, by selecting each cube and clicking Edit: Duplicate Special (making sure in the settings it is parented to the original object as set as an INSTANCE), setting the object’s scale to -1 on x-y axis, and to 1 on each of the other axes. If this doesn’t work then you may have to experiment with the settings to see which axis the object is being mirrored across, and see what fits.
3: after each of the three polygons was mirrored across the y axis, I added edge loops to each one in places that seemed necessary, then simply moved vertices around, added edge loops and extruded faces as needed until I had a low-poly model of my head.
4: I then extruded the inner part of each of the pieces, so as to have a hollowed out inner shell. When I liked how it looked, I deleted the duplicated objects on one side of the y-axis that I created earlier, selected the original 3 objects that remained, and used Mirror Geometry on each one in turn to simultaneously mirror and merge them across the y-axis.
5: I selected only the faces of each piece on the part of the head that is visible to the eye when all pieces are put together, leaving the faces that touch the other pieces and the inside hollowed out part unselected, and used Edit Mesh: Smooth to smooth out each piece. This creates some polygons with more than 4 sides, which Zprint doesn’t like, so after smoothing I used Edit Mesh: Cleanup, checking only the box that says “faces with more than 4 sides”.
6: I checked my model to make sure there were no holes or 5+ sided faces, and to make sure that each of the three pieces fit together seamlessly, then exported each piece separately as an OBJ file.
7: I then opened each OBJ file in Rhino, exported them as STL files, and imported them into Zprint, where they were (hopefully) ready to print!
1: First, I created 3 polygon primitive cubes in Maya. I drew up several model sheets of my character’s head from the front, side, top and back view, in order to give myself a frame of reference while modeling.
2: I moved and scaled these polygon cubes to correspond to the back of head, top of face, and bottom of face respectively of my character. I then scaled each of these cubes down by half, so that the left faces of each cube rested on the y-axis. This is to enable me to model both sides of the face simultaneously, by selecting each cube and clicking Edit: Duplicate Special (making sure in the settings it is parented to the original object as set as an INSTANCE), setting the object’s scale to -1 on x-y axis, and to 1 on each of the other axes. If this doesn’t work then you may have to experiment with the settings to see which axis the object is being mirrored across, and see what fits.
3: after each of the three polygons was mirrored across the y axis, I added edge loops to each one in places that seemed necessary, then simply moved vertices around, added edge loops and extruded faces as needed until I had a low-poly model of my head.
4: I then extruded the inner part of each of the pieces, so as to have a hollowed out inner shell. When I liked how it looked, I deleted the duplicated objects on one side of the y-axis that I created earlier, selected the original 3 objects that remained, and used Mirror Geometry on each one in turn to simultaneously mirror and merge them across the y-axis.
5: I selected only the faces of each piece on the part of the head that is visible to the eye when all pieces are put together, leaving the faces that touch the other pieces and the inside hollowed out part unselected, and used Edit Mesh: Smooth to smooth out each piece. This creates some polygons with more than 4 sides, which Zprint doesn’t like, so after smoothing I used Edit Mesh: Cleanup, checking only the box that says “faces with more than 4 sides”.
6: I checked my model to make sure there were no holes or 5+ sided faces, and to make sure that each of the three pieces fit together seamlessly, then exported each piece separately as an OBJ file.
7: I then opened each OBJ file in Rhino, exported them as STL files, and imported them into Zprint, where they were (hopefully) ready to print!
Update
The past few weeks I have been printing out a lot more heads for my puppets; I should be nearly done except for a few expression changes on the minor characters, and some in-betweening on the main characters. I've also made more progress on building my set, and once I get the reimbursement from my production budget I can buy more supplies and finish things up.
The most fun thing has been seeing all the heads I've printed out in their true 3D form, after drawing them on paper and modeling them virtually, and the subtle and not-so subtle changes that come with each translation to a different medium.
The most difficult thing is trying to figure out what to use to make each part of my set LOOK realistic without being too heavy, bulky, or expensive, especially the metallic pieces. Hopefully I'm achieving a balance between feasibility and believablity as far as set dressing and props are concerned.
I also wrote up a progress description for my technique in modeling the puppet heads, which I'll post
The most fun thing has been seeing all the heads I've printed out in their true 3D form, after drawing them on paper and modeling them virtually, and the subtle and not-so subtle changes that come with each translation to a different medium.
The most difficult thing is trying to figure out what to use to make each part of my set LOOK realistic without being too heavy, bulky, or expensive, especially the metallic pieces. Hopefully I'm achieving a balance between feasibility and believablity as far as set dressing and props are concerned.
I also wrote up a progress description for my technique in modeling the puppet heads, which I'll post
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