I had so much fun with the pantomime project, that I wanted to truly challenge and push myself for my very first speaking character.
Because I’ve been looking at the Animation Mentor characters for so long, I really wanted to use a different character for this project. So I found an amazing company called ProRigs who have an incredible library of characters that you can rent on a monthly basis for your personal projects!
The characters are beautifully designed and the rigs are really well made… I decided to use “Lucas” as the star of my next project…
The normal thing for animation school projects is to find a clip from a TV show or movie and then lift the sound from that clip as the basis for the acting shot. I found a completely stupid clip from the completely stupid show “Always Sunny in Philadelphia” where the character Dee has gotten a “job” as a server at a competing sports bar…
With the audio set, the next step is to plan out the action and shoot a reference video. Again, because I’m not a good enough actor to do both facial expressions and body language together at the same time, I shot that separately and put them together on the same screen using After Effects. The result is a reference video with everything I need to get started…
In the bottom left is a thumbnail of how I’d be approaching the facial expressions for the character. This gives me and the instructor a good idea of what to expect, and I can move on to blocking out the scene…
With feedback from the mentor, and A LOT of tweaking over the next 4 weeks, the fully realized scene came out pretty well (if I do say so myself)…
I was so happy with this scene that I decided to take it one step further and render out the full shot with materials and lighting. I exported alembic files from Maya and brought them into Blender as an experiment to learn how to use Blender on future projects. Here’s the final result…
