MODELING

The character named Bob is a cheerful, little overweight thirty-something bloke who has a little too high opinion of himself. His face is inspired by the early days James Brown and the styling was done with the help of my good friend Marieke de Boer.

Based on the first sketches of the character, I worked out the design using a self-hardening doll clay reinforced with armature wire and modeling wire mesh. The base shape was sculpted and after the material hardened the details were cut with a knife and sanded with sandpaper.

The 3D modeling was done in Maya using polygons for the body and cloth, and subdivision surfaces for the head. I created a low-poly version (5.5k) for better viewport playback during animation and cloth simulation, and a high-poly version (92k) for final rendering.

HEAD RIGGING

Facial deformation is completely controlled by blend shapes, and the deformation of the neck, tongue and teeth is controlled by the upper part of the joint skeletal system. The facial muscles were captured in 37 individual blend shape models. Eyelashes were modeled as well for better control over their shape, and wire deformers make them follow the movement of the eyelids. In total the head rig counts 61 individual controls.

Other hair like the beard, eyebrows and scalp hair (both short and long) was made with Maya Fur, and given shape through fur attribute maps painted in Photoshop. I added dynamic behaviour to the long scalp hair by linking the fur to a hair system, with follicles attached to a separate nurbs patch, whose shape exactly follows the shape of the polygon head scalp.

BODY RIGGING

The deformation of the torso and the limbs is controlled by a joint skeletal system in combination with a complex set of influence objects, all balanced together with painted smooth skin weights. In total the body rig counts 116 individual controls.

The complex set of influence objects was created for additional control over the body shape and skin folds, and consists of 35 ‘poly wire’ influence objects, with 128 individual ‘poly wire’ blend shapes underneath, that I mixed together into 28 clearly understandable body fold and deformation control attributes. The artificially created ‘poly wire’ object was chosen here over the standard ‘nurbs’ wire deformer because the ‘poly wire’ made it a lot easier to keep the influence area more local to its deformation. For additional control over the shape of the arms and their effect on the shape of the body, I used 30 ‘poly cube’ influence objects that were mainly controlled with set driven keys.

During the whole process of body rigging I used a set of 20 typical body poses to fine tune all the individual controls and influences.

ANIMATION & SIMULATION

To make the control rig more user-friendly, I added a set of control curves for easy access to controls and attributes during animation. The curves can be (un)hidden just as easily as you can switch between the low-poly and high-poly versions of the model. The control attributes are also collected in character sets.

For creating a dynamically moving blouse and vest, I used the low-poly model in T-pose as a starting point for cloth simulation with Maya nCloth. With the high-poly body shape as a collision object, I created a set of nConstraints to keep the blouse in place and buttoned up, as well as to keep the vest moving and sliding realistically on top of the blouse without sliding of the shoulders completely. The actual button on the blouse was attached to the blouse, using a hair follicle on a stand-in polygon that was constrained to the blouse during cloth simulation.

Using a successfully baked nCloth simulation and with construction history turned on, I could then create a high-poly simulated version of the blouse and vest by adding nodes for smoothing the geometry and giving the fabric some thickness.

RENDERING

Besides the turntable test environment, I also created a large city park environment inspired by Central Park in New York.

Shading, lighting and rendering was done in Mental Ray for Maya, using Photoshop for creating texture maps. I rendered separate passes for:

• ambient, artificial and natural lighting,

• diffuse, spec, occlusion, shadows, fresnel and id,

• environment, character and fur.

that were taken into Shake for compositing and fine tuning for best results. Motion blur was added with RealSmart Motion Blur (RSMB).