39. LOW RESOLUTION STAND-INS

With the sets and the characters completed, it would be time now to add animation to the characters, and help them tell the H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Music of Erich Zann."

I figured that I would start with the first scene first, and then move forward from there. Right from the beginning I saw challenges that this project was posing on my computer. I didn't even try to animate the characters nicely at first. I just wanted to shape and block out animatics in order to get the roughest version of the film done, and then I could see where I could improve the animation, sets, and even cameras. Even the simplest animations, and moving around the scene were causing my computer to slow way down, and I questioned if I would ever get through these bottlenecks to finish the project. For every hour that I worked on the animations in their respective scenes, I would need to restart my computer at least once.

However, I have dealt with this sort of problem before, and so I intended to solve it in the same way I did before, by creating a low resolution version of each of the sets. I would hide all of the high resolution geometry, and simply build a layer of very low resolution geometry in the exact same spot.

In order to help improve the look of the low resolution geometry, I rendered orthographic views of each of the buildings, and then I could use that rendered image as a picture to slap on top of the cube that I would use for the low resolution stand-in.

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37. ZANN'S BUTTONS

The only real difficult challenge with Zann's clothing came with the buttons that I wanted to add on his shirt. I knew it would be difficult, so at first I decided against it. Well, I didn't think that modeling the buttons would be difficult, but I did know that once Zann was setup for animation, that the buttons would react and distort in odd ways with the skeleton.

Anyways, after finishing the rest of Zann, I tried to make the buttons. They looked good... but only if I didn't animate his torso. I knew that wasn't going to be an option, so I tried to figure out a way to set up the skeleton, and/ or skin weight, or lots of other things in order to make this work. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out a solution. The skinned model would never animate just the way that I wanted it to when applied to the skeleton. That is, the buttons would stretch and distort into odd shapes when Zann's torso was moved. So after painstaking trials, I eliminated the buttons from his shirt.

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38. FACE TEXTURES

I know that characters are what drive any story. That being the case, I know that our eyes are first drawn to character's faces in order to make a connection. Therefore, I had to spend a lot more time than I am used to when texturing faces. After doing some research, and collecting nice resources, I made sure to use them.

This meant bump and specular maps for lips, wrinkles, and painting a bit of make up, too. I was nervous about doing any of this. But a little bit of patience, and taking time with the project allowed me to turn out something better than I expected. I primarily used skin textures that I found from various sources, and then layered them. This included gray-scale wrinkles that really helped with Erich Zann's character design, but also for the lips on the student's face. 

I created a simple UV map of the faces using the cylindrical mapping tool. Then I exported that UV map, and used that as a framework to paint over. Typically, this meant placing new layers of wrinkles or lips over the UV map, and then modifying their shape to fit nicely. This required me to go back to the 3D app, and see just how the maps were placed, and then going back to the painting app and adjusting as needed.

   

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36. ZANN'S CLOTHING DESIGN

Zann's clothes were quite a bit more difficult than the student's clothing. I suppose I could have taken another easy way out, and given him a turtleneck sweater and sweatpants. But I wanted him to have more of a grandfatherly look. However, this goal wasn't always so clear to me.

By chance, I had the television on, and Seinfeld was running in syndication. (It seems like if I really cared, I could probably find Seinfeld on tv at any time of day; when I was a kid, I Love Lucy was like that.) Interestingly enough, the episode called "Old Man" came on, and I saw exactly what I wanted in terms of Zann's character. There was no way that I was going to try create his crazy hair and mustache. But I love the way the old man looked in his sweater. So I was determined to achieve that style.

Having modeled human characters wearing all sorts of clothing for Homeless Guy, I had some idea about how to get the effect that I was aiming for. I would just have to add a bit more detail than I did on Homeless Guy. This wasn't so bad.

Looking back now, I do think that I went a bit too cheap on his pants. I should have modeled some additional seams on the side of his pant legs. In fact, I had wanted to initially. But I couldn't get it quite right, so I left it out. I hope the viewer doesn't mind too much.

The one spot where I knew I wanted to get interesting was with his shoes. I thought of Zann as that crazy old man that wears sandals, even though his ingrown toenails are bloody with infection, coupled with fungus. I've seen such shameless people a lot in my life. I thought that Zann should be so shameless. However, while I did give him sandals, I didn't get add medical specimens to his feet.

The other part of Zann that was more difficult than I expected was his neck. This is for two reasons. One is that I wanted him to have a double chin. However, I just couldn't make that work. Next time I will try harder.

But the other challenge that Zann's neck presented could not simply be ignored. Being that he had a neck, a sweater, and a shirt, he had two collars that would have to stick up, and then come back down. Because I had accomplished this with some effect on Homeless Guy, I didn't prepare for the challenges that emerged when adding real detail. When layers of geometry stack upon each other, it gets a bit confusing keeping track of what's what, and which geometry I am trying to modify. This would be especially problematic when animation setup came around. So in the end, I accepted that I had to make Zann's collar a bit more simple than I might have preferred.

  

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35. EARLY ZANN DESIGNS

Counterintuitively, despite the fact that the body types of the two characters were drastically different, I was so proud of the nude female base that I just created that I used the same base for Zann's body. Certainly, modifications would have to be made, but at least the base geometry flowed in a satisfactory way, and I would just change the shape of a lot of the loops and faces around the character: it's easy to thicken up the arms and legs and belly. Of course, after the simple stuff, a lot of tweaking and minor changes were necessary.

It seems to me that the function that relates time to quality of work is something like: y = root x. That is, for the first quantity of time, quality of work improves greatly. But that same amount of time will only increase the quality of work exponentially less. I usually say it takes t time to get to 70 percent done; then the same amount of time to get to 80 percent; then the same amount of time to get to 85 percent, then the same amount of time again to only get to 88 percent... and I hope the idea is clear. 


The first thing that I notice is that the musculature of the face is wrong around the mouth and nose, and I fixed that.



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34. HAIR

At first I modeled the student's hair as a type of helmet. I figured that I would move beyond that soon enough, but I never did.

At no point did I ever consider that I would try to use 3D tools to emulate real hair. I knew that would be far too costly in terms of render time, learning time, and all other sorts of time-spending issues.

However, I did contemplate trying to use video game style hair. I had to research these types of solutions, and they seemed easy enough. So they seemed. I just couldn't figure out how to apply layers of hair on her head in a good way. Perhaps I was a bit too impatient in this task, and so I never achieved a decent head of hair beyond the helmet that I started with. I am not sure why my eyes were tolerant of this feature in the final product, but I just couldn't see it as a big detriment to the project. I hope I'm correct, or at least that it doesn't hurt the final product too much.

By the way, this is a problem I didn't have with Zann, since I just decided that he would look great bald, and that I wouldn't have to deal with all these issues.

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33. STUDENT'S CLOTHING DESIGN

Of course, I wasn't going to have a nude female run around, scared of Erich Zann's music. I had to give her clothes of some type, and I didn't know where I wanted to go with this. However, I wanted to do something as simple as possible. A turtle neck sweater and jeans seem to fit that goal perfectly. It was a little difficult to find the appropriate textures for the seater, but I always liked horizontal stripes.

The only things needed to add to a nude base were to extrude the wrists, top of the neck, and ankles. To cover the breasts, I had to delete a lot of polygons that make cleavage, and then append new polygons across her chest.

I also felt like she needed something like Chuck Taylors for shoes. That, I must admit, is one place where I got cheap, and I chose not to make shoe laces. That said, I do like the effect that that gave. This was funny, though, because I had actually modeled toes and toenails on her feet, and now those details needed to be deleted. Fortunately, those features would survive on Zann's feet.

  



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