Beauty Approximations

Skinned the character and did a short test for him (bte, why not a her? Well I'm sorry but the gender is not the issue here and a man is the passive choice). Here it is. Obviously the animation is a bit shit at the minute but it raises an important question which I nedd to clear out, it's time to decide a style to the movements. I've decided to go for a overly caracitured look, partly because I'm going for a handmade look and the Disney style is a big reference for people when spotting hand made animation. Second, stylised choices takes away pressure from the quality as noise is less distrubing in an unrealistic environments and I'm not an animator.

Made the dude unsymetrical. Previously today I had some private coffee time and I think I've found a punchline for the story. The dude is going to take different paths after been hit by peak oil- desperate, passive or active. The head is made out of animated strokes and is going to show the mood of the character with color and motion. I will come back to develop these scenarios but now it's way to late for such intelectuall tasks. I need the simple logics of Jack Bauer's belief system.

After some repetetive work of putting out curves I now have the first test look of the character. Here's a short camera movement to see how it works in 3d. After some tweaking on this I will make the other side nonsymetrical and then skin the curves. Hopefully I'll get out an animation test until tomorrow. I also did this version with motion blur turned on, it is quite interesting in how much better it looks, the hard lines doesn't do well without it.

Fiddling around with the rendering and colorisation of the "3d brush" from yesterday and here's the result.

To keep the painted look from the concept work from previous post I needed to setup a "3d brush". Here's an animation where i animate some of the settings. A bit annoying movements when the stroke's curve is animated that needs a fix. It will be interesting to see a couple of these animated to create mioving shapes.

In about a year I have tried to find ways of putting issues of the world in the form of animation. My first attempt in this series, which I have named "Things we know", will be peak oil. A lot of things in this world can be simplified by using graphs. The pendulums velocity and the seasons both looks like a wave when drawn against time in a graph. The entropy in the universe and the posts frequency on this blogg probably follow the same curve- they start high and then as time goes to infinit it aproaches zero. Hubberts peak is the theory that oil production will follow the curve like this and unlike my previous examples this is something that will have consequences for the human race. BIG consequence. Because we may be on the top. Maby we got ten more years but the oil production is going to sink and with that our economy. I will not go further into the politics or physiqs behind this but if you're not aware of the situation it is about time you pick up one of the many b