This is my fan animation of Feathers McGraw from the Wallace & Gromit short: The Wrong Trousers! I created and animated everything here except for the audio clip which belongs to Aardman. This was a multi-year project started in 2022 that I stopped and started many times but after hearing of the new Wallace & Gromit movie Vengeance Most Fowl featuring none other than Feathers McGraw it gave me the final push to finish this project!
The sculpt for Feathers began in Nomad but was refined and finished in Blender. I tried making a custom clay shader in Blender and succeeded but I found it much too slow to use so I remade it in Substance Designer, which I also used for the controller, window glass, and frame and painted with Substance Painter.
The rig for Feathers is a heavily modified Rigify human rig. I needed to reduce the spine bones and add in custom bones for the glove and controller. The glove bones are set to rigify’s tail bone type as it allows bending the entire bone chain with one control at the end. Controller shapes were adjusted for Feathers’ shape.
Here is the setup of how it looked when animating, I had my camera view at the top left, with reference below it and another 3D viewport for animating in. This helped me match poses and figure out timing. I did some stepped animation by hand but some of it was automated with the Stop-Mo addon by SouthernShotty.
Here’s an out of camera view of the scene, which was the window frame reduced to as little geometry as necessary to maximize texture resolution, and the background was a crudely painted cyclorama where I attempted to match the background of the original. It looks bad in the scene but within the context of the animation with the lighting I think it worked out. Also the sweat drops originate in Feathers’ hat to be hidden until they are needed and then I hand animated them going down his body sometimes with a shrinkwrap constraint and by the end with a child-of constraint. The shrinkwrap constraint was nice in that it let me move the drops over the body surface, but sometimes the arms would get in the way and attract the drops or they would jump suddenly, usually where the head met the body, so I ended up going with child-of constraint for the last few so that I could have them move with the rig but not have movement issues.
It was a massive project for me and even with the assists that 3D allows animating it was a lot of work! Much respect to Aardman for all the work that goes into their movies, looking forward to Vengeance Most Fowl tomorrow!
