Not much to say here. It’s a broom, but it’s very very modern, it is the fastest moving man-made object there is. It has a jet engine for when there is a need for extreme speed (imagine a green flame too). It also has a more conventional engine for the usual cruising (imagine it putting out smoke as the fat witch climbs altitude). It can hover because inside the seat it has the same technology that Igor uses to float around, whatever that is.

I hope you like it, it’s not easy designing something new. [Click here to see the images]

I’ve modeled the witch’s cottage. It’s a little stone cottage, and is fairly old looking, but the interior will be very modern – futuristic even. I haven’t done the interior yet, but it’s coming soon.

With the images, I will start by showing my crappy concept drawing first because it’s important to do such things (I mean concept drawings, not show them – I’m very bad at drawing, but it doesn’t need to be that good, it’s just to get the ideas down). If you notice from the scan that I have drawn the picture on the back of some sheet music, then that is because I drew the picture on the back of some sheet music. Next is a render of when the scene was basically blocked out, with the final model details to be done and texturing, followed by the final images. I decided that the forest would be eucalypt trees, rather than the usual european things. I didn’t model any tree or plant or grass in the scene. These were bought. Buying grass from turbosquid means that I have much better grass now than in Midnight with Marilyn, which I can use as much as I want. I’ll need to replace the grass in the graveyard with the new grass.

Click here to see the cottage images

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, I’ve been very busy with work.

This post is to show the results of some tests I did several weeks ago, trying to get hair to look realistic. I’ve had some success. It took some trial and error, there are no tutorials to show how to get hair to look realistic that I’ve ever found. The people and studios that know how to do it seem to keep the information to themselves. Anyway, I’ve worked out how to do decent hair now, it’s a bit tedious, but once it’s done for a character, it’s done. Hairstyles can be reused on other characters too, I could just change the hair colour.

I was testing on the blonde policewoman. the hairstyle is not the final hairstyle, it’s likely to be tied up. The policewoman is not finished either, I’m just showing the images to show the hair texture. I’ll have to redo all of the other character’s hair too, as I already knew I would have to. [Click here to see hair pictures]

Here is the first of the males, Henry, who is Ed’s gardener. Time has beaten me, my holidays are over and I don’t have Henry fully finished. He’s mostly done though, and so is the priest. I won’t have a lot of time for a while, so I’ll present Henry now as he is, and you’ll see what I need to finish. I’d like another couple of weeks to go over all of the characters I’ve done so far and do the finishing touches. I’ll do bits and pieces in the evenings for the rest of the year, maybe they’ll be polished by Christmas.

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I don’t have a name for this character yet, but she manages Ed’s casino. She is aged in her mid-40′s. If anyone knows how to make money for the casino, she does, and she probably takes a good deal out of the casino too, in her own back pocket.

I haven’t made her clothes yet, but she’ll wear something business-like with asian fabric. In fact, there are so few images online of asian fabric at high resolution, that I have bought some asian fabric from Lincraft to photograph and use. If only I can find my camera, I haven’t used it since January.

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I have created a witch who lives in a hut, in the forest behind Ed’s castle.

LittleB (my wife) informs me that witches are usually skinny old things, but I wanted to try modeling a larger size woman. Well, actually “reshape” more than model. Believe it or not, the witch is using the exact same mesh as the brunette policewoman. I just scaled everything out so that the body was overweight, and reshaped the face. The boots are the same as the police woman’s boots, except I deleted most of the mesh above the ankles and gave them a leather texture. Reusing models makes things go a lot faster, many times faster than starting from scratch.

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In this post, I would like to present Margo. LittleB named her Margo.

Margo is Marilyn’s mother, and Ed’s next door neighbour. Her character model isn’t quite finished, but enough that I can move on while I have the time to get on with creating other characters. The final touches for Margo can be done when I have got only a little bit of spare time here and there, and I’ll explain what things I’d like to both add and change. For now, I need to do the sort of thing that requires working for long blocks of time, at a time.

I didn’t reuse the body from the brunette police woman (other characters may). Margo is more slender in shape, she is a sophisticated lady who exhibits a finer level of fashion and style.

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I have some holiday time, so it’s time to get cracking and finish some new characters for the videos I have in mind.

I am starting with minor characters so that I can get as much experience as I can with organic modeling (as opposed to hard surface modeling which I find much easier) so that I am better at creating characters when the time comes to model the main characters. Already I have improved a lot since making Marilyn, I know I’ll have to go back and improve some things with her. I also know now how to make cloth work properly, so if I was doing Midnight with Marilyn again, her dress would move like cloth does when she walked.

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As I have posted before, I am working on my first CG animation, it’s called Midnight with Marilyn. It’ll be just 2 minutes and 10 seconds long.

I’m taking a break from it for a week, while I go away on holidays, but I’ll post some stills from what I have done so far. These still images come from the first part of the animation. Later I hope to add ground fog which will should cover up some of the dodginess in the ground textures.

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I have roughly rigged my goth girl and have worked on a walk cycle for an upcoming animation. You can view it below:

I think I’ll do this post in question and answer format.

Q. This looks quite shoddy, any plans to improve this?
A. Yes. What I have done here is a test render to try and get the basics working, then I’ll refine it later.

Q. What kind of basics?
A. Things like getting the shoes to stay on the feet, make sure hair and eyeballs aren’t left behind when the character starts walking. Seeing empty eye sockets is a bit freaky. It’s also helpful that the skirt stays with the character too, and isn’t left behind.

Q. What is that light flickering effect going on there?
A. It’s caused by rendering the animation without a “final gather” map being created where the light blends nicely from frame to frame. I could have created the map before the render, but this demo was not worth the extra hours that the map would have taken to generate.

Q. The steps are a bit clunky, will you refine this?
A. Just a bit. I have in mind a slightly smoother walk than this, but I want Marilyn to move in a kind of march like way. Her normal walk will be a little faster than this, though for the first animation I have in mind, this is close to how she will walk.

Q. What about the arms and hands?
A. The arms and hands haven’t been fully rigged yet. The skin needs to be weighted (attached) to the arms better, and the fingers have no bones in them so they can’t bend yet. It won’t take me long to do, the fingers will be more relaxed (curved) than in the video above. The arms will swing in a march like way, except when she is angry and they won’t swing at all. For the video above, I was focusing most on the walk (legs) and getting the clothes etc to move with the character.

Q. Will the dress move more when she walks, it looks really stiff.
A. It will move a little bit. More than it does now, anyway.

Q. Now that you have got Marilyn moving, what now?
A. I have to finish rigging the hands and eyes. I’ll refine the walk steps to make them a little smoother, then it is time to start animating her in a scene.

Q. Is that the graveyard scene you were talking about in your last post?
A. Yes.

Q. How long will that take?
A. I’m only guessing, animation is new to me. Maybe two weeks. Depends a lot on render time. I may have to abandon the hair system since it is incredibly slow to render each frame. I’d then have to make the hair from regular polygons and apply a hair texture photo. That would be fast to render, but would not look as good. We’ll see.

Q. Have you got a larger image to view?
A. Always. Click on the image below.

Don’t forget these

Stay tuned for updates!