Post 6

    This week, I am starting a new animation using a quote from The Princess Bride. The quote is:

Westley: "Give us the gate key."

Yellin: "I have no gate key."

Inigo Montoya: "Fezzik, tear his arms off."

Yellin: "Oh, you mean this gate key."

    I didn’t realize how much time it would take setting up for the animation. I first found the character rigs I wanted to use. There were several that I could have chosen from. I imported them into Maya and experimented with their features. I really wanted rigs that had great facial controls, and these three rigs (Dude, Malcolm, and Ray) matched what I wanted. I changed the color of Dude’s (left) clothes to match a prisoner’s outfit. Ray’s (right) outfit was also part of his skin, so I didn’t want to change that, but his clothes were conveniently already orange. Malcolm (middle) has a picker to change his outfit, which I will be doing since he can have a mustache and suit with tie to look sort of like a chief of the prison.

    I then set up an environment using assets from the Animation Starter Pack from MZPStudio. It unfortunately got deleted, but I had the zip file saved on my flash drive. It had a corner of a prison cell that worked out great for me. I grabbed textures from texture.com and applied it to everything. Some of the models must have had bad UVs because textures would warp unnaturally. In that case, I would give it a solid colored blinn and play around with the attributes such as reflectiveness. I duplicated the brick walls, and put in a prison gate door that I found on Sketchfab to close the area. I then grouped everything together, duplicated the groups and translated them evenly using Shift+Ctrl+D to make three side by side prison cells. I then grouped the three prison cells to possibly duplicate and rotate them to be across the original three. I exported everything, so I could make a new scene and reference everything including my character rigs to prevent my project from being too big and laggy. Finally, I put in lights and an HDRI of a cloudy plain.

    I was already getting overwhelmed when I realized how big of an animation this would be with three different characters. I decided to make a storyboard of what I wanted to ease into it. This isn’t an official direction or anything. I’ll probably work on it to include the exact expressions I want and more.

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