After spending the last couple of weeks on this Minimate animation I've realized that it might be a bit more than I can handle right now. There's probably a good four minutes of storyboards all layed out. The scene and characters are all modeled and textured. Unfortunately, I'm running into problems with the animation process. Things that should be simple and straight-forward aren't working properly for me.

It's not the end of the world, I think I just made some mistakes early in the process that weren't apparent until now. The bad part is that I don't know what those were. So instead of starting over and repeating my mistakes, I'm going to scale back and accomplish smaller projects like a creating a Wolverine with functioning claws, Cyclops with an optic blast, Banner transforming into Hulk. Try to learn something from each little success.

I'm not scrapping the large animation project either. I'm just postponing it until I have more experience. Here's one of the many test renders I made for it. Click the image for a 1080x720 version.

The next few posts will be about the 3D Minimate model I created in Blender. This first one has a group of images from my earliest saved renders. By this point the model was basically complete so I wanted to get a good turnaround view. The camera circled the Minimate about three times, slowly moving down over the course of 300 frames.



Being new to Blender I was using most of the default settings. By default, it dumps all renders out to a temporary folder and the filenames are simply the frame numbers. With these settings it is very easy to overwrite old renders. That's why I no longer have the full turnaround.



Of course I could just set up the scene and re-render it, but I've tweaked the model quite a bit since then. During the animating process I found a lot of little things that didn't look quite right. The arms had flicker due to smoothing issues, the hands had shading problems, and the legs had normals flipped in odd ways.



You'll notice the feet are the old pre-C3 style. I knew the first character I was going to animate was the iconic Wave 2 Spider-Man. Sure, there have been other Spideys with holed feet but not this one.



Next up, materials.

I like to use the descriptor 'experiment' for a lot of the things I do. It really helps to displace responsibility for my actions. You can get away with a lot of crappy stuff if you call it an 'experiment'. You were just messing around, seeing what you could do. You weren't trying to make anything good. If it's good, cool. If it sucks, it doesn't matter.

The perfect cop-out.



I learned some valuable lessons from this initial stop-motion project:

• It's very important to lock down your camera's tripod.
• It's very important to lock down your subject matter.
• Pet's should be isolated for the duration of the shoot.
• Crouching is not comfortable for long periods of time.
• Make sure subject is in focus.
• Pants are optional.
• Dancing is forbidden!

I though I had everything fairly secure and there wasn't going to be much jitter. After assembling the frames, I found I was obviously quite wrong. I thought about reshooting or modifiying the frames, but after working with it I realized the subject matter didn't warrant the extra effort. It just wasn't interesting enough to devote more time to. There was no vision.

I intend the next one to be much more interesting.

This is going to be another one of those light-on-text-heavy-on-pics type posts. There's really not too much to say about taking photos of Minimates, having them printed at various sizes, surrounding them with frames and suspending them on a wall. Which is exactly what I did.
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Oooh, progress. I've made the lines smoother and more consistant. Obviously there's color as well. These probably won't end up being the final colors but they're close. I made the heads turquoise to force me to decide on giving them hair or leaving them as blanks. I'm leaning toward 'hair' even though they'll hardly look like Minimates at that point. The chest caps really detract from the Minimate-ness, I think I'll try an alternate version with standard chest-blocks. That should help.

I'm looking forward to the shading and proton streams. I'm dreading the inevitable facework.

Here's a series of photos that I'm actually kind of proud of. I had purchased one of the Kaws Kubrick Bus Stop sets on clearance from an online retailer and ended up being more interested in the bus stop than in the Kubricks. I whipped up a few quick-n-dirty poster replacements, grabbed my tripod and LED lighting array, and just started shooting.
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