I have a simple goal for this years BWC, finish:o. I don’t care how simple things might turn out, I just want to finish.
Now about the stop motion theme. My initial thinking when I heard stop motion was to go down the “Nightmare Before Christmas” or “Coraline” route. But than I remembered stop motion wasn’t just about toons.
The first King Kong movie, the stars wars prequels, The first terminator, the original Clash of the titans and countless other movies all had stop motion animation surely I could go down a different route.
So as a homage to the King Kong movies and as a tribute to my one of my favorite fantasy artists who died this year, Frank Frazetta, I am now working on a Yeti versus the curvilicious warrior Babe.
The base mesh of the yeti is done and dusted and am mid way through sculpting, using jwilkins sculpt branch, there is still work to do. But for a scene that will have only two characters, progress has been good.
I have started blocking in the forms and planes this part of my work flow is pretty inorganic. I sort of prefer seeing my masses blocked in first and making sure my shapes interlock. my work flow is basically as follows
Rounded blocking in which is what you saw on the first post (1st and 2nd sub division), done
Hard edge and flat planed blocking in of the primary forms (3rd subdivision), which is what am working on now
hard edge and flat planed block in of the secondary forms (4th subdivison), next stage
rounding off the secondary form and adding in of tertiary forms (5th subdivision) this returns things to a more organic state.
add in of high frequency detail with alpha maps (6th subdivision)
But while doing this I run into a rather bad bug in the multires modifer that I believe is fixed in Nicholas GSOC branch but not the one am using. I tweaked things about with the grab brushed and this trashed one of my lower subdivisions. Noticing this I went down a level and smoothed things about, thinking things were cool I jumped up a level and things were trashed in that level. Not even deleting the higher level than smoothing things in the lower one before re subdividing once more worked. Basically my mesh is doomed to carry about a trashy looking lower level. The two head pics show this problem.
Now am about to do something more risky which I hope does not bite me in the ass. Edit my base mesh to put in some teeth and a tongue, I think things will work out better if I sculpt this with the mesh as a whole. Needless to say I will back-up my files like a madman.
Here are some pics of where I am, keep in mind what I said about my workflow if you are wondering why things look boxy
Some updates on the yeti, still some work to be done but I think I should call it finished by Saturday. From than on its a mad dash to work on the warrior princess. My plan is to start retopology work on both meshes by the start of August.
