Update August 23, 2018
Village complete! It looks a little bare at the moment, and that’s because it lacks one major thing, characters! Soon this village will flourish with guinea pigs, amongst other things.
The main village
Close-up
View of the shack. This is where the guinea pigs get their food, The little bowls on the ground is what they use to scoop up the food to take to their homes.
A view of Alexei’s home. He’s secluded from the rest of the village for reasons.
Great project. When do you think will you end? Can’t wait for the result.
So almost two months later I reply to this… Sorry, was not even near my pc for the last month… I would like to get a trailer out by next year around this time. The film being in the asset creation stage, it’s a lot of modeling and boring stuff before I start animating. But stay tuned, I will post every completed step along the way!
Update October 31, 2018 (Two months later…) also Halloween
I return for the hundredth time to work on the film, been spending the last two weeks on this asset. Although really I only put about an hour a day on it. (Full time military makes it hard to keep motivated.)
But yes, this is Alexei’s Makarov issued to him from Russia. The model itself is finished but the textures right now are a WIP. I want to add the S.O.A.D logo to the bottom of the grip and fix some UV maps. Other than that, she’s about finished.
I have a real Makarov and used it as my reference for creating this one. There is a scene where my main character, Ven, is cleaning the pistol so I had model the interior as well. (That was fun…)
Looks good so far, I can’t wait to see the film! 
Update November 19, 2018
This one is big, I’m completely re-doing my main characters Ven and Alexei, as well as beginning a workflow for all future characters. It’s been a couple weeks of R&D for these characters, but I’ve learned a lot in the process.
This is Ven 2.0. He is almost in the rigging stage, just gotta tweak some parameters with the 11 particle systems he currently has.
One is rendered in a controlled lighting environment, and the other was rendered with an HDR image. I’m pretty happy with the outcome and the character looks a lot more like Darwin the original G-Force film.
Also, I wanna mention this is a WIP obviously, so some small stuff needs material tweaks, (e.g. his eyeball reflection is too rough)
I will post again when I finish his rig hopefully by next week, until then take care and thanks!
I’m quite surprised on the results I actually thought it was Darwin until I saw that it said ven 2.0 lol can’t wait to see Alexei 2.0 and the others!
This is passion, truely amazing.
Honestly, I can’t wait to start on Alexei lol. I’m very curious on how he will come out. Luckily he’s right after Ven, then after Alexei, comes Tibbetts.
Thanks for the kind words, seriously. It really does drive the motivation!
Heard about the 4.9 earthquake in Anchorage hope you’re okay m8!
We’re good, thanks for caring! We had a 7.0 a few weeks ago, which broke some of my equipment. And that drastically reduced the progress of the film, thus the lack of updates. Luckily most of my stuff is under warranty…
Normally, I don’t like military animal stuff, but I’d like to see this film once it’s out.
Funny thing: I am thinking of my own feature film to be made after working on my original book trilogy. My film, although fan fiction, I’ll like to show it to you if you want some dragon stuff to happen in an animated CG movie.
Question: Will this be uploaded on YouTube, and do you have an YouTube channel? Maybe you can show it off that way better for your feature film. I’m doing just that after my own feature is done being animated by me and another person.
Either way, I’m interested in the final version of your film.
You know, I don’t think that it would take too much to tell this story without involving Disney’s copyrights at all. The idea of militant gerbils – while very fun and original – is not something that can be copyrighted, and so your models don’t have to exactly match theirs at all. And, if they don’t, you’re all-clear.
I remember that movie and always felt that Disney didn’t do a particularly good job with it, probably because they felt they had to stick with a PG rating. They held-back so very hard from “anything that could conceivably offend the censors” that there wasn’t actually very much left of their story – and they probably knew it.
(A catch-22 with animation is that you have to pour so much effort-equals-money into producing anything, especially in those days, before you have anything for the censors to see. If one of them is having a bad hair day, you’re basically screwed.)
First off, that’s amazing that you made a book trilogy! (My energy was exhausted halfway through my first book.) Also, I loved dragons since I was a small kid, (thanks Spyro…) so I’m down to check out your creations anytime.
To answer you’re questions, yes it’s going on Youtube, but the channel sadly has only one video showing the film. The video itself was terrible, as it was my first try hard animation ever on blender. Or maybe it wasn’t the animation itself, but I didn’t bother to storyboard anything. But it taught me a lot on certain aspects.
I really do appreciate the interest, if you ever think about making your book into a film, keep me updated!
Agreed on Disney’s route with the film. It’s hard to turn anything military (or at least a realistic portrayal of it) into a PG film, but they tried. Also, I’m mostly fine with keeping this film a fan fiction. Maybe one day, the original creators would see the film and see the direction I took the original characters, and the universe. Would be pretty cool to hear their opinions. One of the main goals of the film is to hopefully show that you CAN make a serious rated R style film with animal characters, and be enjoyable.
Update December 28, 2018
Hope everyone is doing fine this holiday season, and new year. Yes? No? Ok whatever.
I finally finished Ven 2.0, or actually I finished him last week, his rig is still being tweaked, (I hate weight painting). Much like the original Ven, the rig was built from scratch, as well as the facial rig. This rig is WAAY more complex than the original and I’m actually kinda proud of it. The facial rig is a blend shape rig and contains more than 175 shapes to get various expressions. (I have renders of the expressions and will maybe post those as a later date)
Other than that it’s something new to look at, yay!
All renders are at 4k resolution and rendered in 2.79 cycles. (I’ll use 2.8 on full release)
Next up… You guessed it, Alexei!
Update January 7, 2019
A little preview on who’s coming up very soon
Yes yes I know, eye reflection, lips… its a WIP
Update January 13, 2019
I finished Alexei’s fur and now I’m about to begin the rigging stage. This character got done a WHOLE lot faster than Ven, being that most of the attributes are the same. Although it may seem that I just got Ven and re-painted him. That is not the case. I actually sculpted out a whole new character with different reference. It’s just that guinea pigs sorta look alike lol.
Every time I remake something, I compare it to the original to see my progress. With these current characters, the change is so drastic that I feel like I have to share it. I absolutely love Blender and I feel like I got so much better from just a year or two ago. And maybe in like another year or so, I’ll remake these again but even better!
Update January 24, 2019
Alexei finished! The rig is the same as Ven’s for the most part, with some improvements. I took some things out, and put some new stuff in in this rig. The hardest part of this character was doing the expressions, being that Alexei doesn’t have “eyebrows”. I had to improvise with his eyelids in a way.
As always, rendered in 2.79 Cycles, 4k resolution.
And now for new characters, the next one is Tibbetts, he’s a special guinea pig…
