Pre-Production: "Barnabas" Dummy Pose Tests

Hello Everyone,

A slight delay for this post but what can I say been kind of using the night oil yesterday particularly doing a bit of concept art on the ol IPAD. A bit fascinated at the moment but to be honest we are quite far along with this idea already. Sammy is working tirelessly on the story development sections of our short. I have a couple of sound logs to be posting up soon of our tutorials with Alan and Phil. These will fall under the Video logs section of this blog, having talked with Alan it was kind of suggested that I do audio recordings and not video.

I have a video of our briefing which I wish to put up but I'll ask about that when I go back on Tuesday for some Maya fun. This post is a follow up from the pose tests I did with the Benjamin base form. Alan was a little peeved thinking that these basic character forms were my way of declaring a development step with the model making. The truth is these forms are not a step at all, they are to convey form on a primitive level (i.e. the building blocks of a character). Before detailing a character sketch you would block out form, that is what these are... nothing more. My creating basic poses for these forms is to show my partners how our chosen forms animate... they are nothing finite.

These poses helped us narrow down the decision of the final form for Barnabas.

The image above shows two forms which we were stuck at a crossroads with for Barnabas's form at a base level. From a front perspective the proportions merely look to be the only obstacle (check out Barnabas's base form post here). In truth at this point I was outnumbered 2 - 1 by Chrissie and Sammy on the base form for Barnabas being Form 2. It wasn't until I showed them how form 19 and 2 looked while posed that got them to reconsider Barnabas's base form. I don't like to toot my own horn but this just goes to show that posing these primitive forms helped us agree on the basic anatomical proportions of Barnabas. You can sketch it, but I modelled it, roughly.

From coming to an agreement with Form 19 (image above) it means that now we can go away and base sketches on this form. Our concept art will be liken to this type of character for Barnabas. These forms are just to give us a blue print for the character. We learnt the importance of base forms back in Year 2 for Justin's class. I have always found that base forms can chop and change, this process is my way of exploring the form within the same set of shapes. This allowed the girls to join me on the decision that this form (19) was more ideal for Barnabas then the one they previously liked (Form 2). The form just made more sense when we looked at it engaging in motion.

It was also nice to have the freedom to explore the characters movements myself (image above). I liked getting in the head of our characters to act out some of their potential movements. It is just one of many steps in our process of creating a great set of characters. Now that we have form identified we can begin producing lots of conceptual based work using these forms as primitive guides. We can even see the form performing crude actions so we know how they could move. To suggest that these symbolise anything more then reference for concept is not the case at all... I still have to develop their form further and will do so in the coming weeks.

Last but not least are animated turnarounds of the poses (shown above). This is just so we could see the poses from every possible angle. I physically brought the forms posed to a meeting in .obj format. We opened them in Maya and laid them out, it was this step that made them reconsider form 2 and join me in agreeing to Form 19. This is not to say that they were wrong about Form 2, it just had less form then Barnabas's later renditions of form. After the meeting the girls sat down and using these base forms started sketching and playing with poses and ideas... That was the outcome of this entire experiment, and it worked!

I knew what I was doing when I knocked them up and now that these are done I can begin knocking up base forms for other characters. At the end of all of this we should have a nice range of concept art. I will point out though that this is only being done for the 3D characters. All of the 2D characters are going to be knocked up as and when most likely with the set image planes. The good thing about this is firstly I don't have to model a tonne of characters and then try to rig them. We also get to combine the 2D and 3D medium which is not something I have done since Year 1 Unit 3. If anything it should show how much better I have become since then lol (I was terrible at that Unit).

Anyway ill be back with another post soon!
Let the fun commence!

xXStItChXx