Leopold the White Rabbit

Leopold`s name was an homage to the involvement of prince Leopold (Queen Victoria oldest son) in Alice Liddell`s life, curiously is the name of one of her future sons. The "White Rabbit" is actually a Plush toy who becomes alive through Vorpal technology, so the Rabbit needed some background research on the dolls of the late 1800.
This first toys depicting animals were kinda freaky, some had real hair and some appear clothed. Also que problem with design was making it cute while respecting the period. You can check out this Pinterest link for some Retro/Vintage/Primitive Bunny rabbits

A Rabbit plush toy in early 1900

So this challenge was not to make just a cute plush toy, but to make a real character that needed to convey sympathy, be true to its time and also needed to look like a very loved toy. The body needed to look used and over cared, full of patches with different patterns as if he passed from brother to brother until he came to Alice. I also wanted to use the less amount of plush possible, to avoid looking like an "living, furry animal". He should look artificial, man made and then, progressively become a living character in the viewer`s mind.

 Sketch/Concept used for the final Rabbit

The next step was visualization, a real doll was needed to use in our capture sessions, sometimes as a reference, Alice spends about 60% of the story interacting or looking at Leopold. So came the need to contact Ana Santos from the Store "Coração de Pássaro" who provided the skills  and inventively created the life size Leopold for us to use. Then, to have the real deal meant that i could copy the textures using Ana`s fabric patterns (or even the seams).

Leopold prop by Coração de Pássaro

Because the digital Rabbit model was already being used in animatics, a small update needed to be made, in this one i blended the good features of the real Leopold with the first concept,so the details went to the model but i preserved the volume from the original,  at some point in time there will be a robot inside.

The "Wunderland rig" also needed to capture a different type of anthropomorphic body, Leopold was the first body in which i had to modify the actual armature to accommodate the character structure (large torso, small and wider hips). 

The next upgrades will require some cloth dynamics for the ears and in some spots of the body. The goal is to achieve a more sacky motion on the limbs, but at the same time i will be continuing with the capturatics (yes, a mixture of motion capture and animatics). 

I am very proud of this character because he is the marriage of two worlds and various crafts.  Thank you Coração de Pássaro for helping with Leopold`s birth.

More news as soon as possible.

Jules

Alice adventures Underground Production Diary 1-Wonderland Rig

The Wunderland Rig 00.1

What is the Wunderland Rig?

The input mocap Rig in yellow and the the keyframe rig in black

The Wunderland Rig is my journey to develop a tool that can be useful to blend motion capture files with a keyframe animation.  Working as an animator for about a decade, my ambition is to gradually work with huge, or even massive projects. I can understand the frustrations of having to much to do in one scene since in Alice I have about 5 rigs/actors moving at the same time in only one set.

On the other hand, I want to leave the animator's position for a while and use the actors movement to sketch the action. The finessing would occur later  in Keyframe animation. Even if I have scenes where a character runs in motion capture and then flies in the keyframe. To "Blend" those actions would be very useful.

The capture process in Ipi

Because Alice "Adventures Underground" is almost a "no budget" project, the affordable solution for mocap was to use both kinects (depth sensors) and pseye cameras. As capturing software, I used Ipisoft Studio for body capture and Faceshift for... the face. Both need to be captured in separate and then brought to Blender. The Wunderland Rig will need to interpret those "signs" and translate them as a motion sketch for me to continue my work.


Then, and since I'm not a coder, I had to come up with alternative solutions and some constrains and use some "MacGyver" skills in order to make a working rig ready for the film. The rig's name was Hybrid rig, but, as an homage to it's main project, I decided to call it "The Wunderland Rig". Why Wunderland is written like that? Because my Alice story arc (my expanded universe) features World War II and Hitler's involvement in the Vorpal's technology. Hence Wunderland.

On The Muscle system
My muscle system is nothing much than another detour in the Blender developer's wish list. It works by using the shrinkwrap modifier (only Blender geeks can handle this part). But the Shrinkwrap can sometimes perform with not so perfect surface snap movements. Ex: when the skin slides over the muscle, the shrinkwrap is not ready for a smooth sliding. The function detects that the skin is going into another vertex of the muscle and it snaps when and if you're using a lower poly mesh. I realized then that using a smooth modifier on the muscle affected zones could ease those movements. The muscles can also be simulated by using softbodies on them, that will have cool effects on the skin, specially if you`re animating a larger creature.

Inspirations
My experiments in this way of creating muscles in Blender came from two sources: first, I loved the Blenrig that J.P Bouza made and shared, and second, Weta digital tissue solution gave me some ideas about having ways to simulate skin and muscle wiggling.

Final toughts and the future of the Wunderland Rig
Well, at this point I will be cautious since the Wunderland rig is still an half achieved dream. I am an animator, a  3d artist and a storyteller. I have built this system mainly out of necessity, to shorten the gaps in motion capture and ik animation.
I think that there's nothing wrong in using both systems. The purists may say that motion capture is a cheat, and it's not animation. In my mind (and in my heart) they may be half right and I think it's not a bad thing to use actors to input models. Even in today's hollywood's standards, most of the captures are tweaked by animators, fingers and faces are corrected, but for marketing reasons most of the times only the actor/performer gets the higher credit. But I am very proud of using a mix of both techniques. I know it's the best part from both worlds.

As for the future of  Wunderland rig, an interface needs to be coded into an addon to allow the switching on and off of the ik joints from the mocap input rig. If I want to have an upper torso mocaped and the legs keyframed, I have to select the joints, go to the constrains tab and switch from there.

Also, I can see huge improvements on the muscle system, but those still depend on the future of Blender. The improvement of both the shrinkwrap modifier and the implementation of a gpu subsurf would make it more accurate and faster to work. This way of deforming muscles depends on mesh detail and softbody simulation, the higher your skin, the best it can interact with your muscles.  For now, many characters in the film are heavy clothed and have most of the  muscles turned off.