The virtual cast is set!
So I finished all 30 or so characters for the new film... they are all modelled, textured, rigged... all have auto lip sync setup and morphs ready to go... they are all ready to be animated! But I must thank my assistant/girlfriend for taking care of some of the repetitive work on the characters...
I thought I was going to be able to use the same morphs for all the character heads by setting them up on one head... then using morphs to switch the different heads and then using the jaw rigging/skinning/facial expression morphs that I had setup on the first completed head... it did work BUT it didn't produce nice/reliable facial expressions as some of the faces were so different from the base head...
So what I did was create a master face controller rig with all the user data sliders setup for the facial expressions... then I went through and created/exported all the morphs for each character and handed the files over to my lovely assistant... then she imported the morphs and linked them to the user data sliders I setup with Xpresso... and sent the files back to me...
Once all the auto lip sync/morphs were setup I just had to make some small checks on all the characters... making sure they were all on their own layers, with a separate layer for the head rig as it has a ton of expressions which slows down viewport speed... putting the head rig on its own layer allows it to be switched off when animating the characters body...
Looking at my calendar I see that this part was completed right on schedule which is always nice ^ ^
Now I'll move onto to building the sets and props... with this film I decided to keep it simple so the whole film takes place inside of a tiny village and the surrounding forest... there's three or four complicated set pieces but nothing too insane...
I'm going to give myself about a month to build/texture/light everything... then about a week or two to do render tests, make matte paintings, and do final checks before going into production with the New Year ^_^
There's no better way to usher in a new year than to go into production on a new animated feature film ^_^ A new dream to float inside of....
I hope to launch the Kickstarter for the film in a week or two as if I'm going to be able to hire voice actors I'll need some lead time to get them recorded before production begins...
Unlike with HSM you'll be able to see and learn a little about the characters and the world right from the get go as I'll show some of that stuff for the kickstarter campaign... if you have any ideas/recommendations about the campaign... like what I should offer as rewards etc please let me know!
The look of this film might surprise those of yall who have been with me for awhile... because in my opinion the look isn't very strange at all... well the monsters are ^_^ but the characters are pretty normal looking in my opinion... pretty standard 3d anime looking...
I literally wrote the whole 92 page script in 3 days... and from start to finish the characters took about 2 weeks... so with this I'm trying not to over think or over tweak... just tell a story that means something to me and have it be interesting and exciting...
If I am to meet my personal goal of releasing a new animated feature film every other year I'll have to do everything this fast... so far so good! (EVEN though the corsair SSD I just got to use as my boot drive freezes randomly 0_o) but yeh same PC I used to make HSM... the only new thing I got was the SSD.Brought to you by professional weirdo M dot Strange.