The most challenging part of making animated film is the characters. While it’s not exactly easy to make all the sets and props in 3D, they don’t have to move. Or if they do, they’re relatively simple to set up. Not so with characters. Even the most basic human character has dozens of controls to set up for basic movement and facial expressions, and that doesn’t even factor in things like hair or clothes or any custom aspects—like going feral and turning into werewolf!
Because I’m just a single human, there’s no way I could create all that stuff entirely on my own. While I might be able to build a single character from scratch at this point, filling out a cast of over a dozen characters would take months per character. There’s no way I have that kind of time, so I rely on a combination of free and purchased models to help get me started.
All the characters are based around DAZ3D’s free Genesis 8 platform, imported into Blender where they are customized and rigged for animation. All their clothes were purchased from the DAZ store, and again modded to match the character designs from the comic. Likewise, a number of the props are purchased models, but I model custom stuff that I can’t find elsewhere. The sets are also a mash-up between things I model myself and purchased items and buildings. Anything specific to the scene is likely to get custom modeled, while the background details and everyday items are more likely to be assets I’ve bought and modified.
All of the main characters—Kate, Mike, and Chow are customized rigs exported out of DAZ and modified in Blender to give the stylized look that more or less matches their look in the comic.
Kate’s transformation is controlled with a few simple sliders, which saves a lot of time instead of having to dig around to find a bunch of separate controls in the Blender interface.Animating a run cycle. The shapes over Chow’s body are the controls that make him move. The rig is like a digital puppet!
The supporting cast is being created using a what I call “universal rigs.” Unlike the main characters, these are set up with controls to change facial features, body type, height, weight, colors for the skin, hair, and eyes, and even have some basic haircuts and outfits already set up. In order to create a new character, all I need to do is tweak a few settings and voila! A new basic character is ready. That’s great for background characters, but for more specific supporting cast, I have the option to export new outfits and hair, modify the details in the textures and add any custom features like hair and clothing controls. All told using these “universal” rigs shaves days (or weeks!) off of the production time.
Gang members created using an updated version of the universal male rig, but customized with new clothes, hair, and detailed texture maps.
The controls for the character’s colors, face, and shape are on the lists on the right hand side of the screen. All this took about a week to set up for the initial universal rig, but now that means I’m saving a week of work every time a new character gets created using this as a foundation. Basically, I’ve transferred a huge chunk of the versatility of the DAZ3D Genesis 8 platform over to Blender, here. These face and body shapes are all presets in DAZ. What I’ve added here is the cartoon look, stylization, and custom Blender-specific rig controls.
Next week we’ll take look at the process it took to make Kate!
Back in 1999 when I first wrote the scene, I could clearly picture it playing out as an anime. Even my comic storytelling style has always been heavily influenced by movies and animation, to the point where I really felt like I was storyboarding the action I could clearly see in my mind’s eye. In Restless Sleep, I had my first taste of doing that with Kate’s werewolf transformation, but while that was a technical challenge on its own, it had fewer moving parts overall. Also, I was pretty green as an animator, and still had a lot to learn about timing and character performance.
This time I feel ready to tackle a more complete story, and , I want more action, more characters, and dialogue!
Restless Sleep was a great project to learn animation, but because it was just that—basically a student film—it was best that I did it privately in my studio. I wasn’t ready to share it until I knew it would actually be completed. Chinatown will be my fourth animated project following two major projects for the Storiaverse app—This House, and the upcoming piece, Character Assassin. And this time I’m ready to bring you into the studio while it gets made!
Original scene from the comic used as a storyboard.Scene modeled and animated in Blender.Rendered alley background layer (minus characters and shadows.)
The basic process is first, all the characters, props, and sets need to be modeled and prepared in Blender. Once the assets for a given scene are complete (or mostly complete), I can bring everything into a scene file and start setting up the shots by moving the characters and cameras around. Once I’m happy with the basic timing, then I split off all the shots into their own files and do the actual animation. After all the animation for the shots are complete, I fire up the GPU and light the scene with a live preview, take care of any effects for the scene, and use Blender’s Grease Pencil to create the outlines to give it a more hand-drawn feel. Then all the layers for the shot are rendered out—backgrounds, characters, and effects. Then we move over to After Effects, where the finishing work for the shots happen. All the layers get brought in and stacked, kind of like Photoshop. I can then tweak the lighting, shadows and put in any extra 2D effects to give it a polished feel.
Here are some more comparisons between the comic and the film:
Animating this took a fair amount of planning. The blue lines that flash in and out are guides I drew into the frame (from the side) to help time Kate and Chow’s run cycles. That way heir feet landed it the right place on the ground, and they’d end up in the right places on camera.I remember having the hardest time figuring out how to draw Kate falling after getting hit. I was never really satisfied with this panel, but went with it…But when it came time to animate, it turned out to be a great starting point! Animating this was incredibly fun.After realizing the test animation felt too slow, I spend it up for the final. The end result felt really satisfying!
So, we’ll be giving you weekly behind the scenes updates on the film project as we proceed (with a few extra goodies for subscribers and backers, of course!)
