Thesis Project

Though you could easily find more on my website about my thesis, I decided to give a quick synopsis of what its going to be as well as post some images and videos from it.

My thesis is based on the Aesop's fable "the two fighting cocks"
In the original Asop fable, there are two fighting roosters attempting to lay claim to a farm. The bigger rooster beats the other to submission, and then jumps onto a fence and boastfully caws. An Eagle see this flying over head, swoops down and takes out the prideful rooster. The weaker rooster is now left to rule the farm he has won be default.
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In my version however the Two roosters are going to be fighting over a woman in a bar. the bigger rooster is going to beat the other into submission, garnering a swift and physical exit, provided by my eagle which in this case is the bouncer. The woman leaves with the calmer smaller rooster. the end. 

Now That all sounds fine and dandy, but what does it look like?

well my characters for this short look like this:

Here we see the boncer (eagle), Shy guy(small rooster), Love interest (farm), and finally the douche bag (large rooster)

I have my story boards done out, and its 37 scene panels, not including transitions and cuts,so I'm hoping that translates well.

They are fully formed, I am a sculptor at heart and love form, especially the human form, I feel constructing the character this way gives me a better sense of who they are.

Yes these are turntables from Zbrush however, these models all have correct edgeloops for animation

    

These vids are probably small, and are best viewed in youtube to see.

Now out of these characters, the small rooster or shy guy, however you want to call him, is my main man.  He'll be telling the story through his eyes, though the story has no speaking.

He was my focus, and currently I have him crudely, but satisfyingly rigged and has blendshapes begun in zbrush

 

Zbrush has a lovely feature in its plugin suite simply called blendshapes

more info if you click the link. 

It allows you the ability to sculpt in layers on zbrush and import each layer as a separate blendshape.

Layered blendshapes in zbrush is something I've been playing around with for a while. In a previous project I did, I used zbrush's powerfull layers to create blendshapes for a mad hatter character I created. 

 Now this was two years ago, long before the plugin was available for zbrush so I had to manually import each layer, masked off of course, so that they could fluidly work with each other.  Using Jason Osipa's book: "Stop Staring" (then at volume 1 haha) I began to assemble a decent facial system, and brought it all together with my own facial rig:

And of course with that I had to play with it, and so here was the presented head, with wrinkle maps, 36 blendshapes, and a crappy lip sync of Osipa's provided tracks:

But back to the thesis.  I'll be doing renders of the bar soon, and will have all the characters rigged by next week.  Then its blendshapes, and then animation tests.  These next three weeks will be filled!  I'm also teaching a class on game design this summer and will be preoccupied with that, but I promised myself I'd get something done.

Anywho thats all for now, good night.