sheep.handturkeystudios.com

Following the modeling post for the Firefox logo, the next obvious step is the process of rigging, animating, and rendering the Firefox character. With the basic simplicity of the model, rigging was relatively straight-forward. The only really tricky part was the fact that the fox wasn’t modeled in a standard neutral pose. However, since the animation in mind for this character only involves it moving around the globe, it’s not a horribly large problem. As with before, this entire process was done with the most recent development build of Blender.

Using the final pose as the assumed resting pose (since that’s the place where the fox has to look the most “correct”), the rig was built around that. A couple key features to note about this rig: the head and neck form one IK chain while the tail forms another that grows from the base of neck bone. Another pair of IK chains control the arms.

Also, rather than using bones as targets, Empties were used. The interesting advantage of this is that the empty could copy the rotation of the IK bone and provide greater control without actually interacting with the armature. You might also notice that all of the controling empties are parented to a single empty in the center. This empty is actually located at the center of the globe model. Since the motion of the fox is predominantly rotational, this works well as the major control for its movement.

And since this set-up requires a bit more control, I did not use the new Envelopes feature of Blender’s animation system and instead relied on good old-fashion weight painting for each bone. Well… actually, not so old-fashioned anymore. Blender’s weight painting was upgraded in 2.40 and is a lot nicer than it used to be. At any rate, I digress. With the fox rigged and weight painted, the animation keyframes were set: first the rotations of the central empty and then tweaks to the fox’s pose as it made its rotations, working from general motion down to specific motion. Another thing of note is that apparently Blender cannot currently keyframe the scaling of the camera when it’s in orthographic mode. This necessitated that I keep the camer in perspective mode, with the lens maxed out at 250 and moved quite a long distance away.

One thing really needed work, though. While the general motion of the fox was on target, it needed something extra to push it in the right direction. That would be motion blur. With motion blur, the illusion of fire can be telegraphed and the movement looks more natural. Unfortunately, Blender’s mblur has historically had the price of long render times. However, the development version of Blender has something that makes this process a lot less painful… and it looks better, too. That would be node-based compositing. Running the render passes through a vector blur node in node editor yields great results and at a fraction of the render time used with standard mblur.

And with those last little touches (and some sound), the animated tag for our contest entry was completed. Click the image below to see the finished animation, rendered in mpeg4.

And, as a gift to the community, we will be offering the full NTSC resolution version of the animation to anyone else in the Firefox Flicks Ad Contest who wants to use it. See the main Hand Turkey Studios website for details.

Update:  We finished the spot!  Go see it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at 2:34 am and is filed under Art, Blender, Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.