Ingram the Friendly Giant

Well here's a first, blogging from my own domain :)

Wishing you all good health during this C-19 lockdown!

Anyways, let's do this...

Around May 2019 I was commissioned with creating a 3D giant which was to be incorporated in to live footage. Eeeek!

Armed with a simple 2D illustration I had to find the way of converting the friendly look and feel into a fully fledged 3D model with articulation.

What you will see during this blog is just the evolution for the look and feel, with a little throw away animation here and there to test different face poses.

Step 1 - create the basic sculpt

Step 2 - Get ready for the re-topology process (Very Important for any animation)

Step 3 - Get cracking, let's throw down some polygons

Step 4 - During the re-topology and sculpt phase, can we decide the look and feel?

Step 4 - A mix of sketch with a painted head / hair texture

Step 5 - A slight evolution in the look and feel

Step 5a - Let's alter the Morph poses (eyes and mouth separately)

Step 5b - A quick preview showing expression

Step 6 - Hair, tests show that we need to create a new look and feel for the hair

Step 6a - Will the new hair work in motion?

Step 7 - Scale is everything, and so is a body!

Step 8 - We approve the look and feel, which means going on to the rigging / baking textures and animation stages

Step 9 - T-Pose is slightly easier to add a skeleton / joint system

I think there maybe scope for a part 2 which will delve into the baking the hi-res model into a much lower resolution model (whilst retaining the details). I had some major problems in the animation parts and some very tricky camera tracking to do.

Let's put it this way, Cinema4D was the only application that could successfully track the footage!

Cheers

Scott