Tetris Musical

# 1 16-04-2012 , 07:28 PM

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Location: Los Angeles, CA

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So, as the title suggests, I'm putting together a Tetris Musical. The geometry is simple, the shaders are going to be mostly toon shaders and lamberts, with a studio white background box, so I'm really focusing on animation rigs. I'm VERY new to character animation, as in, I started in March, but I'm not particularly new to maya.

Here's what I have:

A lambert eyeball with ramp shaders for the pupil/iris. The ramp color positions are expressioned to in-scene curves so I can change the size of the pupil and iris independently. Since I'm the rigger and animator, I decided to forgo checks to keep the pupil smaller than the iris. I can do that myself. I also have a deformer lattice on the eyeball, but I'm thinking its controls may be too dense for my purposes... thinking of thinning those out. Of course your standard look-at control, as well as eyelid open/close controls. Plus a highlight control. The director is going for highlights that express instead of reflect surroundings, so that funny oval with a line through it is the highlight control user added image

And each major control (Lookat, distort, eyebrow, special) set his hide-able from custom attributes at the control root.

Nothing too wild here, but the eyes will be the single-most expressive part of the characters. The result will be similar in style to an earlier piece the director did, pac-man: the musical.

Pac-Man the Musical: A Pacapella Song - YouTube

Edit: There are some other small problems with the eyeball rig that I'd like to fix, but I can live with them and probably have to considering this needs to be done as soon as possible.

--
Peter Srinivasan
Producer

Last edited by petersrin; 16-04-2012 at 07:29 PM. Reason: incomplete

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# 2 16-04-2012 , 07:35 PM

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Next we have tallGuy:

Like I said. Very simple geo. We're considering taking artistic license and making him only 3 blocks high instead of 4 to make him cuter, more proportional. Obviously the eyes aren't in at all, but what I'm really concerned about is how to rig him. I THINK I want a stretchy-skeleton to control a lattice deformer and then add to that some controls to stretch him sideways and wierd-ways as well, but I'm concerned about attaching eyes to him at that point, so I'm thinking about that now. I've with some success used the ParentToSurface script that uses follicles as attach points to hook some barnacles up to a zombie-fish, and could perhaps use that for the illustrious eyeball attachment, but that workflow had it's problems too... any feedback there would be great.

--
Peter Srinivasan
Producer

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# 3 05-06-2012 , 02:10 AM

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Okay, so now that the Gyarados shots are out of the way I can focus on Tetris again. We've decided to move forward with a hybrid solution to the proportions/cuteness factor above. He'll have three wider blocks on the bottom and a fourth, tall one on top. BUT, now I've gotta go. I'll be back after E3!

--
Peter Srinivasan
Producer

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# 4 09-07-2012 , 07:27 AM

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Finally, I'm getting somewhere with these silly singing blocks! Spine Wave with stretchiness single and double wave options rigged to a simple tetris block and some lattice deformed eyes (with blendshapes for primary animation). Also, he's kinda cute. And sad. I haven't rigged the eyes fully (with things like aim, though pupil, iris, and eyelid rigs are in place. They can't look anywhere yet.

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