Greetings and salutations again readers!
Last post, I gave a very brief summary of the end of the film production in May and the subsequent work that I have done to keep polishing the film off before sending it to film festivals. Here is what has been the recent progress I have made in that time since then.
Our main character was re-topologized, and I began to start opening the alien's mouths. The aliens heads are more akin to a reptilian jaw, where the lower jaw is slightly smaller and nested within the alien's upper jaw. In order to make the mouth bag, I created a rough rig that would separate the lower and upper jaw of the aliens so I could see the inside faces a little better.
I duplicated the geometry and then extruded the faces and bridged them to create a rough inner mouth cavity.
After re-binding the rough rig to the new geometry, I was able to close the alien's jaw, but the vertices where the upper and lower jaw connect were not nearly as cooperative. I chose to use vertex snapping from the original head to restore the neck and head shape where the painted weights were not well balanced, and then used vertex averaging to get the inside of the mouth of maintain the gums and smooth when the alien's mouths were closed. This is the completed open mouth and closed mouth for the alien.
In addition to the mouth, I also created a closed eye lid for our aliens through live snapping and a lot of manual vertex placement and averaging. My first attempt at the blink, I didn't have the alien's eyeballs move, so it created a blink that looked like this:
While it wasnt a bad look, it was a really big deformation for the eyelids to cover that much surface area. In order to improve the blink, and make it more interesting, I made the eyeballs suck into the head during a blink like a frog. Here is an image with both blinks for comparison.
With the new heads completed, I transferred the vertex orders between them so they would all be considered the same model, and then used the morph target and layer system in Zbrush to create a mesh for sculpting that we can use to improve the eyelids and inside of the mouth. Here is a blended blink and mouth open hybrid model that was made possible in Zbrush:
I am going to entrust the sculpting process of the alien to a peer, but once the sculpt is done, I will work on re-topologizing it so that we can use the new sculpt and subsequent blend shapes for rigging purposes.
In addition to this project, I also began working on an environmental prop asset for the gas station set for my own personal satisfaction and the film. Our gas station doesn't have a name to it currently in the film, and it takes place in the middle of nowhere Nebraska. One of the cast members has family over in Nebraska, and their family name was Lang. So to make a gas station that had a super cliché and unrealistic name, we chose Lang's Gas Oasis and wanted a tropical theme to the logo. The gas station's sign was an asset so low on the priority list that we never had time to even concept it out properly, but this was something that I was super excited to work on in my free time over the past couple of weeks. I made an initial sketch in about 30 seconds that was really rough, which looked like this:
This drawing was laughable in its low quality, but the idea was to have a palm tree that would sway up and down with two sets of neon bulbs, have an arrow, and more of the commonalities of neon signs. While working on this drawing, a peer of mine saw the drawing and offered to redraw it with some of their ideas in mind. Here is their drawing that they made on top of my sketch:
This drawing is already a lot more interesting than what I had envisioned, and a lot more compositionally balanced. We decided to abandon the idea of the two neon sign trees pulsating back and forth so that we could maintain a nicer silhouette. I took this sketchier drawing into Illustrator, so that I could remove some of the sketchier aspects of the drawing and use guides to ensure matching proportions and spacing. Here is that vectorized image:
And from that image, I took it into Maya, and created a 3D model with realistic details for the thickness of the the fluorescent bulbs, neon bulbs, bolts, H-beams, and marquee sign. The sweep mesh creator was crucial to making this sign look perfect, and here is a couple snapshots of the model with wireframe and lighting:
The UVs of this object were laid out so that the bulbs on the bottom are in sequential order, so that I can take the emissive texture map from Substance Painter and animate the brightness in a liner line on the sign. The peer of mine who drew the sign from my sketch will be responsible for texturing the sign, so I look forward to sharing what their work looks like after they finish it.
I have a lot of different projects that are being worked on as well, in the next post, I look forward to sharing how those projects are coming along! Thank you for reading and until next time!
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