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Scud Submission… Finished August 1, 2008

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Best to just watch it at blip. It’s bigger.

Here’s the obligatory YouTube video for those who enjoy shit quality:

Characters, animation, rendering, and editing was completed over the course of three months, from May to July. Many shots took several days for the computer to render.

I am considering this the jumping off point for a full-blown adaptation of the first issue to be released online as a miniseries.

Characters and story by Rob Schrab.

All voices provided by Alex Weitzman.

Vlog #3: Jeff! July 27, 2008

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Only seven days until the deadline for the Scud short film competition, I show some Jeff animation, stills from the short, introduce my blog, and talk about the numerous obstacles thrown my way over the last few months, including an overheating computer, astronomical render times, and having to do my real job.

Sorry about the shit sound quality. I know it’s hard to hear me over the music. YouTube apparently didn’t like my audio compression and I don’t have time to fix it.

Late July 8, 2008

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My brain’s clocking overtime and it’s 4:30 in the morning. I was just thinking about how this long process gave me a better appreciation of Jeff’s whole design. She’s made from so many disparate parts but she works as one character. That’s really an achievement for an artist who was, and he’d be the first to admit, an amateur when he made the first issue. In retrospect, the pink really highlighted the squid too much. I think Rob understood better than me how much the complementary colors help integrate her.

I was just explaining to a lay person how 3D works and figured, what the hell, I’ll throw up my musings here.

Where does anything start in 3D? Polygons. So you build the polygons. It’s best to avoid polygons with more sides than four, as they deform oddly in animation. So you’re building something out of squares. You can’t use too many because you don’t want to make things unnecessarily hard on yourself or the computer. So you have to figure out the “flow” of things. How to make a face, for example, with squares but not too many, that will animate easily? How do the corners of the mouth flow into the nose? How do you make that work?

Once that’s done, you’re into colors. Texturing. You have to unwrap your model, which is sort of like ripping your skin off and laying it down flat on a table, then painting on it. Long process. You also have to consider how your textures will react to light. Skin, for example, is more translucent, so you might have to make two or more textures for the different layers, then apply a shader and adjust it until it looks right. You have to determine which areas are more reflective than others (a nose, for example, is more shiny than a cheek) and create a texture for that. There are a lot of considerations. These are just a few.

So you have a model with textures, now what? Bones. What does a basic bone setup for your character look like? On top of this, you need to decide how you’re going to animate it. Does the shoulder drive the arm or does the wrist? Both? You’ve just introduced a new problem to solve. What about how one bone affects the movement of another bone? What about muscles? Do you want to animate every knuckle of every finger individually? Or would you rather create an automatic function for it so you could grab the top knuckle and make a fist? Or come up with a way to do both? It goes on like this.

And then, once your rig’s finished, you have to skin it to the character, make sure all the right points are affected and that joints stretch where they’re supposed to. It’s not automatic and it takes goddamn foooorreeeevvverrr. I hate skinning.

The software instructions are basically useless beyond learning the fundamentals of how the software works. I read them. They suck. A good instruction manual would be around a thousand pages and very, very boring. I learned mostly from classes and tutoring DVD’s I found on the Internet, which do a great job of showing you how to implement concepts to specific needs. You watch enough and you start to understand intuitively how everything works to where you can mix and match. A lot of Jeff’s rig, I improvised from ideas I picked up from other sources.

Squid Update-ish July 7, 2008

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The squid is now a pale purple that looks close to the original shade of pink when light hits it directly. I think this is actually a little bit closer to my original conception of it, as it is now semi-translucent. I’m also much happier with the “suckers” on the undersides of the tentacles, which are now darker and contrast better.

No screens yet but I am re-rendering my turnarounds, as well as working on a walk cycle as we speak.

How’s that for a happy medium?

Squid July 6, 2008

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Been having a discussion with Shane Hillman, who did the alt. cover for the Scud omnibus, about whether I should change the color of Jeff’s squid to purple, like it is in the comics.

My feeling was, I generally don’t like to see super-bright primary colors in computer animation. It’s 3D, it’s that little bit closer to reality, and nothing in the real world is that bright. So that was my thought process changing the purple to a light pink fleshy color, to have a color that’s at least somewhat subdued but that still works in a cartoon reality.

We were throwing Photoshop adjustments back and forth. I think if I do change to purple, the shade in the second picture below will be what I aim for. Not in-your-face purple but still… purple.

Original up top, hypothetical adjustments on the bottom. I’m on the fence. Changing it means I have to re-render what little animation I already have. So I want to be sure. What do you guys think?

Jeff. July 5, 2008

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Animation… soon.

Old Scud Updates July 5, 2008

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Want to get this blog caught up before posting anything new.

These are the original poses rendered for the Scud model after he was first completed. A few small changes have been made to the model, nothing huge, but I’d like to get more poses out there soon.

Hey, look at that, it fits. Here’s the rest in links anyway:

Pose 2

Pose 3

Pose 4

Pose 5

Pose 6

I also remade the guns to bring them closer to the look of the comics. This will be the gun used in the short.

3D Scud Logo, based on the original design. My one major artistic liberty there was adding Scud’s reflection in the bullseye. It looks good animated.

Render of Scud in the vending machine:

A quick render of Hershel Roundhead, the character for the short that I worked on between Scud and Jeff. I didn’t bother posing him but there’s a bit of animation with him in my second vlog.

Bringing us up to date is a teaser image I posted in the comments section of Rob Schrab’s blog while working on Jeff, Scud’s archenemy.

First Scud Animation Test

Vlog #1

Vlog #2 (with Hershel Roundhead and logo animation)

You can see all of the above videos in high quality at my blip.tv channel.

Let’s Get Started… July 3, 2008

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Pat Grubb. 3D artist and animator. Among other things.

Graduated from The Art Institute of Philadelphia about a year ago. Currently, I do animation gigs in and around Philadelphia, mostly culled from Craigslist. Whatever I can get my hands on. No big industry “ins” yet. Working on expanding my portfolio and demo reel, both of which are looking pretty outdated at this juncture. I do much better work now; it’s a matter of turning all the new bits and pieces I have into something presentable. Here’s a bit of logo animation I worked on for Cold FuZion Studios. Subject to change.

Back in April, Rob Schrab, creator of Scud the Disposable Assassin and writer of Monster House, finished up his long-delayed run of Scud. To celebrate, he started a Scud short film competition. Three minutes, dealing with all things Scuddy. I immediately went to work on a 3D Scud character. Rob liked it. Since then, I’ve been developing an animated adaptation of the first issue of the book for submission. I’ve since finished two more characters and had my good net friend Alex Weitzman, voice-over artist extraordinaire, record dialogue for Scud and Hershel Roundhead.

Unfortunately, life happened and a lot of different events converged to keep me from being where I’d like to be in the production at this point. With the deadline less than a month away, I’ve only just now finished creating Scud’s arch-enemy, Jeff, who has proven to be an extremely complex character with my most detailed rig ever. I have not yet publicly revealed her. By now, there is very little time for creating the necessary environments, blocking out the choreography and camera angles, animating, and rendering for the original idea. What I submit for the competition will likely be several easier scenes from the first issue, as well as animation tests of all the characters.

However, all is not lost. The video will serve as a trailer for my Scud: Issue 1 web series. Five or six installments, released over the course of several months. I’m well beyond winning or losing the competition at this point and am purely doing this for the fun, the experience, and my love of Scud.

I have a vlog you can check out detailing my process. You can also hit the YouTube link to see more. I will be releasing a new one soon once I’m ready to unveil Jeff and after that, it’s a fight to the finish to complete my Scud film/trailer. All pertinent updates from there on out will go here, though I may do a new vlog here and there if the fancy strikes me.

Updates to come. The links up top should be up and running soon. I’m not crazy about WordPress’s page size limitations so until I’m ready to pay for customization, I’ll be linking to my work instead of embedding.