Porky Blinders

Here is the final animation, I decided to just do a playblast with simple lighting. I wish I could have rendered the entire scene but if I'm wishing for things then I would really wish I could have spent another few weeks on the animation! I have learnt a lot during this project but no lesson is greater than the fact that animation is a team effort and good constructive feedback is extremely important. 

I rendered a few of my favourite frames.

Close to finalising the body animation and I've blocked out the face/mouth.

some of the grease pencil notes I made based on feedback received.

Sick and tired of the guns and violence accompanied by a life of crime, this pig suggests to his fellow gang members that possibly just for once could they act like ordinary respectable citizens? 

Here is the stepped animation so far, I'm following the rule one for lip-sync animation and that is to animate the body first and then once that is working I will move on to the facial animation. The animation is very rough at the moment so any notes will be appreciated.    

Here are some of the keyframes with the live-action reference and an insight into the Maya scene I am animating in. I think I could push some of these poses as I was too hesitant to stray from the LAV. 

Blocking out the keyframes has begun, I will post a playblast soon. I also added a skin texture and updated the eyebrow groom.

I think I'm getting there with the groom, eyebrows next. 

I spent some more time grooming, I need to experiment more with length and thickness. I also created a map to remove the hair from the nose. I applied the groom to the run animation using the anim-wires modifier and created a hair cache, unfortunately, the map I created for the nose didn't import correctly so I will also be figuring that out.

Next, I will be creating a groom for the neck, wrist and ankles. re-working some of the texture maps and most excitingly I think I have found an audio clip to lip-sync so I will begin the blocking stage of that!    

I ran through a workflow/style test using ncloth. First I bound the low poly clothing to the closest joints they will be influenced by and set the maximum influences to 1, after creating the ncloth I painted the weights for the input attract (an area that will follow the skeleton bind). I then created a cache for each cloth, after that, using a wrap deformer I applied the sim to the high poly mesh and finally created an object cache for all objects in the scene.

 The main mistake I made was simulating the jacket before applying the high poly shirt meaning that there was a lot of clipping. I also encountered another issue with artefacts on the jacket which I corrected by reducing the thickness and self collide thickness of the cloth. The final result is just a simple maya hardware render.

Texturing in substance

I've started working on a fur groom with xgen. There's still a long way to go, I need to get rid of the hair on the nose and define the eyebrows.

Clothing is modelled and UVs created now I will begin texturing.

The eye rig and pupil control using blends shapes driven by a condition node. 

Skinning, face rigging and corrective blends, its been fun giving him a fatty chin! I'm looking forward to posing him and doing some test renders once I finish modelling the clothing. A breakdown of the rig is also to follow.

Retopology complete, ready to create some blendshapes and rig this guy! I will also be modelling his clothing.

The body model.

The design (maybe?). Heavily inspired by Zootopia. I might add tusks. 

A gangster pig family in Birmingham 1919, this ain't Peppa Pig! 

Porky Blinders! Inspired by a popular street food stand I saw in Manchester a while ago. I want to animate a short lip sync from the show with a porky twist.