Gooseberry: Animating UVs
Daniel Salazar from Pataz Studios talks about the creation of the eyes of the caterpilar in the Gooseberry teaser. It may seem like a trivial thing, but it was full of technical challenges. An interesting read!
Daniel writes:The caterpillar shot in the teaser was certainly one of the most time consuming shots we have done at Pataz, specially considering it’s only an 87 frames shot featuring a glorified worm in a stick :)
No matter how good a 3D software is it will never be prepared for every possible situation a shot might ask for. As a technical artist I’m in charge of figuring out all those little solutions needed to “resolve” a shot. Since an open movie is all about sharing the experience of creating it on this first post I’ll be writing about how the pupils where animated! (you might want to watch that clip again if you missed it).
Link
cool!
the feeling that you delivered something on the far edge, while searching for all posibilities, then found something.
and then some noob says.. hey it looks “so so”, why didnt you do this, and then you realize, that all experiences you had with that, can be reduced to zero by another viewer, while you are still convinced, and start to begin wondering why you are so convinced about. Its quality, but its a thing not often recognized, you had to go trough all of it to get there.
And thats what i see, obviously great work, but stil i would scratch my had thinking about if that’s all..
And as an artist, you always will it doenst matter what you make, artists always have those problems, or else your not an artist.
okay, maybe it was a noob question. … I was just curious, asked why he chose such a complex way and got a great honest answer. and appreciated it.
there is a very true german saying:
“Wieso? Weshalb? Warum? Wer nicht fragt bleibt dumm.”
(“Why? Why? Why? Who doesn’t ask remains stupid.”)
…and yes – there are three different words for ‘why’ in german language.
But do also realize that a noob, could also be a next future artist, in a few years.
As doing things different and wondering why; are combinations, of qualities from people’s creativity. Artists often are masters in creation in any kind of art form.
And even a noob or a child’s drawing can inspire a great artist, as it works in both ways.
The child might find inspiration but also the one who educates.
I was going to say why not try to make it more of an animated mesh for the eyes but after watching the clip a couple of times… I have to say that was very cool and very renderman/pixar like. Gives me a broader thought of UV editing.
Hi, I’m not offended at all by people questioning the methods I choose. It’s the whole idea :D I’m going to repost the answer I gave in the blog:
Question: Couldn’t you have just animate the pupil in a 2D program (such as After Effects or an open source equivalent) and use an Image sequence as texture for the pupil…? The described way sounds awfully inconvenient.
Answer: Well sure you “can”, and for a shot like this it could be fine, but imagine doing that for a full shortfim, and also taking into account all the changes/reviews etc of the animation process. Then it really becomes more of a pain to do it with a video texture. It’s very valuable to me that the facial animation is part of an “action”. That’s my opinion anyway. This could indeed have been solved in a few other ways :)
yep, it also wasn’t meant to be offending (I posted it). As described above (and in the reply below the video) I now understand why you chose that way and it makes perfectly sense.
I just wanted to know why :) thats all.