by Rogério Perdiz
MAKING OF:
www.blenderart.org
‘Orion Tear’
The sceneries simply evolved. I started to model them right away. I wanted something that had kind of a natural feel with a subtle Fantasy look. Basically I’ve started from the look of one real beach place, near to my house, and then mixed it with some valley type of place. But something was missing, it simply wasn’t catchy enough. So one weekend I grabbed my bicycle and went for a ride, without a fixed destination, hoping to find something to improve it. I still don't know how, but I lost myself and while trying to find my way back I found instead one very old wind mill. First I almost completely ignored it and kept on my way, still looking for something for my scenery but, after a while, I start to think: ”Darn!!! I haven’t seen one of those mills working, for decades… funny to find one today… Hum! A mill… Mill!?” I immediately squeezed the brake handles starting a sudden 180º breaking stop, returned as fast as my bike allowed, took a bunch of pictures and after finding my way home I modeled it and there you have it. After that I made some very rough sketches of the final scenery layout, having Mills as the theme (img.1-2) and then modeled a much too detailed version that turned out to be impossible to use... more of that in the next chapters. After that I made some very rough sketches of the final scenery layout, having Mills as the theme (img.1-2) and then modeled a much too detailed version that turned out to be impossible to use... more of that in the next chapters. Note: During this article, by scenery, I will be referring just to the main Mills scenery (img. 2-3). The movie has 3 sceneries, one in the mountains (img. 6-1) and another one that is a surprise!
Modeling Characters: My model skills at the time were already pretty good, so, because I had defined all the details during the conceptual
52 phase, I’ve just loaded the images to the blender viewports and start to model. I started Orion with his Head, eyes and hair; then the body and finally the clothes. By the way, the Orion model that appears in the issue #4 had to be 80% remodeled due to problems in rigging, more on that in the rigging chapter. For all the body and shoes I’ve used the point by point technique, meaning I’ve positioned all the points in space, based on the hand drawings, and only then joined them making faces. The cloths were made initially by several nurbs circles that I’ve joined forming tubes (sadly I lost the screenshots of that and this is kind difficult to explain). For example: basically a shirt is only a subdivided tube that starts in one hand and ends in the other. Then converting the nurbs tubes to meshes I could delete the faces that didn’t matter. For example, the ones in the place where the body and neck passes through. After some adjusting and loop cutting what you get is a very good mesh topology shirt that deforms pretty good.
Scenery: The scenery was my first problem. The first version was much too detailed, with lots of unnecessary polygons. I really didn’t know about the limitations of my workstation, so I made tons of stuff until eventually everything moved excruciatingly slow. I thought: “well, it’s slow but it should do the trick”! But it didn’t. I had generated 2 millions polygons. Happy and full of joy with my self, I pressed Render and guess what? Right! 1 hour of render time which doesn’t work very well for animation using only one PC, besides that Windows O.S. has an annoying 1.5 GB memory limitation and from some angles, rich in polygons, it didn’t render at all.
Issue 14 | Jan 2008 - Cartoon & GE