GADE

Rigging for the "MoonTruck" model for "Lunatics!"

[NOTE (2022): The components of this model have been color-coded for simpler modeling and rigging, it is NOT going to look like this when the materials and textures are finished]

The director animates! It's no secret that I'm not the top character animator around here, but I am learning!

I decided to do this one, because I was interested in the rigging to follow the signature effect (which is using the "dynamic paint reveal" technique that I documented in my production log http://wp.lunatics.tv/?p=3094 ), and also because the character animation part wasn't too sensitive. The character rigging is by Keneisha Perry, based on the rigify rig. The model is originally by Bela Szabo, with a lot of modifications by Keneisha Perry since then. Character design by Daniel Fu.

The hand IK controller is rigged to follow the location and rotation of the pen. I then hand-animated the body and head to follow the action of the arm.

This is from the "Touring Baikonur" montage in the pilot. It's a tradition that cosmonauts sign the door of the hotel room in Baikonur that they stay in the night before the flight, so we decided to include that.

The dynamic paint texture used to key the dynamic paint reveal effect.

After much more experimentation, I've manage a very slight improvement in the writing animation, and also of course added a simple rigged pen to follow the motion (though this is probably not the pen I'll use in the production shot). I didn't want the pen to look too mechanical. A person writes mostly with the wrist (or fingers -- but when writing large letters like this, the wrist motion dominates). So while the point of the pen follows the text, the top of the pen moves less. I rigged this with two separate animated curve paths in Blender, using bone constraints to get the pen to follow them. I'm hoping this will be easy to integrated with the IK rigging of the character.

(No sound).

Test using Blender's dynamic paint to reveal an already prepared signature graphic (no sound).

Revisiting this part of the project, now that I understand Blender texture nodes and other data structures better. This is a simple animation meant to represent the lander's retro rocket firing and stirring up dust on the Lunar surface. This is meant to be somewhat cartoonish, to match the NPR style of the lander and Moon.

The animated texture nodes are shown for the debris spray animation, as well as a wireframe animation for the four meshes used to create this effect.

This is a test of a flickering-monitor effect on the Mission Control Room set. Created for the "Lunatics!" animated pilot ( http://lunatics.tv ). It's really just a 2-second test, repeated 20 times, so you have some time to look at it.

I'm not 100% sure whether I want to use this or not. Flickering like this is more characteristic of CRTs than LCD monitors, but it kind of looks a little more "alive" than a static shot.

The monitor screen are textures with emission settings of course -- a few are AVI video textures.

The model was created by Travis Souza based on online reference photos from the Mission Control Center in Moscow/Star City and updated console designs by Terry Hancock.

Revised preview trailer with title sequence for presentation at ArlingCon 2017.

Keneisha Perry has redesigned the facial rigs for Lunatics, replacing the original shape-key-based rigs with a simpler skeletal rig. This is faster to apply and may be simpler to animate. They still work with Papagayo, as this demo shows. She's also moved on to rigging more of the characters, which is going faster now.

Draft of ambient audio loop for the photosynthetic algal reactor in the colony (it's a tank full of algae with air bubbled through it to pick up oxygen from photosynthesis). Made from multiple original recordings mixed, equalized, and looped in Audacity. This is my first ambient sound loop for this project (seemed like an easy one).