Rigging Dana

Rigging of Dana has begun.  I'm trying to make sure she has a full range of motion

Dana faces

Just a few face tests with captions.  I want Dana to have a full range of emotions.  There's still so little to do and so much time...wait, strike that, reverse it.

Just a nice Dana image

This image is from my terrible camera phone, but I loved how it came out regardless so I thought I'd share.  I like how Dana's blendshapes are coming out and how peaceful she looks in this image.

Main textures comlpeted

With the main color, bump, and specularity done I'll be moving on to blend shapes and rigging soon.  At this moment I don't have the subsurface scattering applied, I'll do that after rigging.  However I believe I'll post a test render of Dana with it.

Texturing Dana

After unwrapping, it's on to texturing.  I'm starting with the main colors first.  once I'm done I'll move onto bump maps, specularity, and so on.  Here's a first look at one of the areas I'm currently working on.

Prepping dana for texturing

Now that the main model is completed, I'm moving on to unwrapping before texturing.  The checkered pattern helps me avoid stretching in areas while mapping everything out.

Dana: final version

If you saw the video I posted a few days ago, you already know of all the attempts done on Suicide Friends.  This project has been going for years, and the recent design proved to be (though my favorite) the most taxing.  The traditional animation with Roger Rabbit styled lighting was taking too much time with just one person working on it.  If I continued, this film wouldn't be done for another 8 years.  So I decided to try a digital Dana again.  As the video showed, I did this once and the result wasn't to my liking.  She looked like an alien, but it was the best I could do at the time.  I stopped on the idea of doing a full CG film until I had more practice.  After working on "the Grim" (http://thegrimanimation.blogspot.com/) I believe I've had a good amount of practice and rebuilt Dana.  The result really pushes the first one aside (I honestly feel weird even comparing with these images).  Someday I'll do a traditionally animated film, but I'll wait until I have a crew of animators.  Until then, I'm happy with how Dana is coming along.

Suicide friends evolution

Here's a look at some of the testing that has gone into Suicide friends.  The project has gone through many changes, once being planned as full stop motion, again as full CG, and another time as a mix of media.  After a lot of testing I found that I can produce stop motion and CG in the time I'd like for this film, but 2D on my own, especially in the desired style, takes a lot of time.  With the amount needed for this project and being done on my own, this film would take about 8 years to complete.  So now I'm looking to produce this film using CG and stop motion.  I'll greatly miss the 2D aspects, but someday when I have a large team I'll tell another story in that style.  I have no shortage of ideas.