Luckily I was given the chance to experience a bit of both. My incredible teacher mentor has been immensely supportive of my desire to do far too many things at once. Two other students who are doing similar things as myself were given a tour of an independent stop motion studio because my instructor knows some amazing people. Seeing what goes on in the studio was so inspiring, yet I definitely had to rein back my ambition due to expenses I just could not spring for at the moment. We learned their process of puppet creation, using polymer clay and silicone molds. If I had a better paying job and my apartment had better ventilation, I would have attempted to mimic their process.
My compromise was to sculpt the characters I designed out of an oil based clay. I chose this for two main reasons; First being that it allowed me to enjoy the physical aspect of creating art that the computer just does not allow. Secondly, as amazing as Zbrush is, I have a much easier time creating the subtle curves of organic creatures in the physical realm. Most of the things I draw are very soft and round, and 100% intended for some sort of children's media related future.
Based on those concepts my instructor and I settled on the girl with the pig tails and the weird monster thing as a pair of characters. The slightly hazy story behind these two is that Zoey has an imaginary friend who just happens to be a giant monster. She gets bullied at school and one day imagines a giant monster to defend her from bullies. . . or something like that.
So from those turnarounds I created wire frames out of soft aluminum wire, stapled to a wooden board for stability, and proportioned according to each character. I am very bad at taking in progress shots, So the girl is in her final form for scanning. She took roughly 8 hours to sculpt. The monster was completed in 4.
{Monster Final sculpt}
At this point I am 3 or 4 weeks into my 11 week quarter, and pleasantly ahead of my planned schedule. I had one hurdle to get over before moving away from traditional art and into CGI, and that was to bring my characters into the computer. I am lucky enough to have a tech savy father with a 3d scanner. My parents came up to my teeny 5th floor apartment and spent about 6 hours scanning my characters. The process would have gone faster, had my apartment not been so hot that it shorted out my dad's computer seconds before the final scan of the girl was completed.
The scanning process was very interesting to witness and take part of. The cameras were set up beside my counter, and through some flashing lights and a little plaque, a volume for capturing my sculpture was created. So even though the camera's could see everything in my kitchen, none of that was scanned because it was not in the defined volume. Scanning then began.
{Image}
the projector flashed various lines of light cascading across the kitchen to better define the surface of my sculpt before the first image was snapped by the cameras. The figure started out facing the cameras directly, then after each picture, rotated about a half of an inch before it turned a full 360. That scanned data was then patched together using the software Geo Magic, which did a fantastic job of compiling all the pictures into 3d point clouds of my characters. It was able to clean up stray data, and remove any piece of the sculpt I did not want in my final obj.
I re- topped the characters using Zbrush, as well as utilizing that program for creating diffuse and normal maps for the characters.
Using Maya 2012 I unwrapped, Rigged, animated and lit the scene. Below is the culminating video.
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