There's gonna be Iceshed...

First of all I have to say everything in this page is WIP and does not show entirely the quality of final short film. These pictures and movies would show the progress of the production of the film.

  

  



  
  
  

After a very long delay in-between posts finally some WIP production shots...
   




Some more R&D/Visual Development stuff

  
  


Just a cloth-simulation WIP

OK, finally after a long long delay, in which a lot of progress were made, here are some new pics... although I have the particle solution, but let's leave it for a later tease...

During learning Houdini, I also gave it a try regarding simulation of one of my shots... and I like it

I guess you can see the rigs (facial and body) are ready. (With Special Thanks to Paul Neale for his great DVDs (http://paulneale.com ) ) The face rig is brilliant in a way that you can save the poses as a blend shape for hand animation... Although I have resolved the face rig in a way so that I would be able to do video-based facial capture (from at least 3 cameras... in other words, Davy Jones procedure) Just suffice it to say that when you do video-based facial capture, all the trackers are solved based on their position in the space and the tracking software doesn't understand that sometimes the head rotates!!!

and these are some body rigging/skinning videos... (all the videos between 3-10MB)

 

Sherri is done :-D

I have updated Frank's eye shader. Also a little tweaks and changes overall to make it look better

After a long process, I think I nailed the look (especially the eyes). I have asked so many people about how they feel about the look of the character. Although I am going for a certain look (which I believe would look great in the end), but as much as I liked the look, most of the people I showed it to, didn't like it. So I had to find a perfect balance of what I thought is the necessary element in stylizing the character meanwhile considering other friends suggestions.
(The ice test here is as said, is just a test :-D )

 
       

Frank and Sherri models are done. Although they are not final yet, (since some elements would change during texturing; like for example... look at the hairs - they are floating in the air :D) I am pretty happy with the models. I really tried hard to stick to the concepts and bring that kind of look to the characters. I know Zbrush/Mudbox models with insane details are being used everywhere these days, but this is the style I really like and gonna stick with. Not that I know how to use those packages, but I believe that going ultra-realistic needs a really good team/additional equipment to get past the uncanny valley (which I believe still no full-CG movie had got past that). Hope it has worked out

   

   

Here are some early ice-shader tests that I did a while ago...

(The model is like 1 year old and it has changed a lot since then, but I thought it would be neat to show how the early stages of production was and also I was trying to figure out will I really be able to pull the ice-shader off or not. The model is even older than the concpets)

   

I personally like the first one. It has a really cool looking icicle effect inside the body.

Here are some of the concept work I had to do for the character design. Although I am not much of a concept artist, I pretty much enjoyed the process and it was fun while I was doing it, and it turned actually pretty cool. One thing that I have to mention is that all these pieces are all inspired by comic artist Joe Madureira.