Animation Plans 2022 - The Acidic/Bunsen Collab, Zoe Makeover, and more...

When people asked me what's next I've usually been a bit reserved in my announcements, with the only major reveal being the most obvious one that Encounter 3 is already being planned. This was however only the tip of the iceberg, as there have already been a few things on the horizon that were planned since last year, with one thing being a collab that involves Acidic's Bunsen model.

Cid and me have been in the talks of teaming up on something for over a year now, and with me finally getting all in on the latest version of Maya and Redshift, this finally became viable. We've decided that it would be a great idea for me to try my hand at his Bunsen model to test out the waters. You've likely seen the model around for a while now in form of  the highly capable Blender rig. There however is a Maya rig of the model as well that was rigged by Nutty_Mr_Gecky, which was perfectly usable with Maya and Redshift. The rig supposedly wasn't as elaborate as its Blender counterpart whatsoever, which is why I've sat down for a couple of days to make adjustments to the overall model and its materials.

The first thing that stuck out to me were the eyes, which were basically the same as in the Blender model. I completely replaced them with a similar eye model I had originally done for Zoe, which is a physically-based one with iris shapes that could be animated. Since we're dealing with a dragon, I've added another blendshape target that allows for an oval iris shape. Overall I think the new eyes breathe a lot more life into his overall face, perhaps even make him a bit cuter, which to me is a nice bonus. <:

Next up was obviously the mouth, which needed a bit of additional weight painting as the tongue exposed a few odd polygons when bending it. I wasn't too keen on the original shape, which is why I added an additional blend shape that morphs it into something that looks a bit squishier. In addition, this can be used to animate the shape of the tongue as well and is similar to what I've done with Zoe's tongue, you've probably seen it balling up and changing its size a lot in the recent animations. Various blendshapes have also been added to his throat, which came with no animatable deformers to begin with, so I added a couple ones that can make it wider and flex it as well!

All of his materials received a large overhaul as well! Next to tweaking roughness, reflectivity and subsurface scattering, I've brought in a couple of new texture maps as well, including a normal map for his tongue, which is derived from Zoe's, as well as a more detailed normal map that is used to bring out a bit more surface detail on his scales. They're now using a displacement shader, which brings them out a lot better! Cid was so kind to include a displacement map, but it had some issues as it created large visible seams on the model. I've managed to fix these, but I'm assuming the seam issue was why the map was never utilized in renders or animations before.

I'm still ironing out some minor things with the model, but when I'm done with it I'll be sending it back to Bunsen and Acidic, so anyone who uses Maya and Redshift can give this model a spin. Obviously I have one mini animation planned with him for the next month, which is something I'll get into a bit later. Should this be met with a warm reception then I'll likely do a slightly longer animation (2 - 3 mins) in the form of a Halloween special later this year. This would pretty much be a special mini episode in the Encounter series and feature Space Hero, a spooky forest, as well as full voice over for both characters. The time would also be used to do some work on Zoe, for which I've planned another belly-related mini animation as well for the next months. This will however still be using the current, rasterized model.

Zoe's Major Makeover

With the shift to Redshift, a large part of Zoe's features became non-functional, with the biggest one being her elaborate fur and hair. Throughout the recent months I've had the chance to try out various industry-leading fur and hair plugins now, including X-Gen, Ornatrix, and Yeti. I've eventually settled for Ornatrix, as it has the artist-friendliest approach so far and lets you style a character's fur in realtime. I've already practiced a bit with the plugin and mainly used it to add a layer of 3D moss to some environment assets, which Redshift surprisingly handled with ease. It's save to say that I'm pretty much ready to work on her new fur, but after a few weeks of careful consideration, I've decided that before tackling her fur, she might need a revision that goes a lot deeper than this.

Throughout the recent years I've added a ton of new features to Zoe's rig, which included model-specific stuff such as proportional edits, claws, pawpads, etc; as well as animation-related controllers for her body and face. A lot of these were post-rig additions, which have made the rig incredibly heavy. The last time I've actually re-skined the rig was actually before the Halloween animation 5 years ago, everything after that was basically stuff I've added on top of the model, and it's beginning to show. A lot of these issues came back to haunt me while animating the last Encounter episode, as the rig wasn't only heavy to work with, but also had a couple of bugs that I needed to work around at times. I frankly don't want to carry all of this stuff over into the next generation of films, which is why I think it's time for a major revision of the model that includes major improvements and an all around cleanup of her topology. There are a couple of things about her model that I've been rather unhappy about, which includes her lack of proper eyelids (mostly been using cutouts for the eyes), her hands, feet, and clothing. This could all be tackled before a makeover of her rig and would provide a much better base to add fur back onto her.

The goal with this makeover is to breathe a bit of new life into her and hopefully bring her on par with a character that could be straight out of Zootopia. I'm certain that this major model revision, as well as the addition of ray traced lighting would make for a transformative effect on her. To accomplish all of this within the next few months, I've planned to collaborate with other artists from our community, which should keep my hands free enough to still make new animations for the time being.

I'll of course keep you guys updated on how things are progressing and will post small work in progress updates in between the usual animation playblasts. It's certainly going to be one heck of a busy time! Thanks to all of your amazing support I've also started to consider building a proper render server later this year when NVidia drops new GPUs. This is planned to be a remote PC that will house multiple GPUs for the purpose of not only grinding away frames in a fraction of the previous time, but to also to elevate the visuals of these animations to new heights!