Celso Mouth Set

Carrying on with the Celso Skull, I have reduced his eye size a bit, as advised by my followers' comments, added some "hairs", and started scultpting mouth shape that will be eventually 3D printed just like for Manny.

As mentioned earlier I am using zBrush and I am still at the beginning of the learning curve. Lessons learned: it is much easier with a Wacom tablet, and Layers are an awesome way to store and mix shapes in zBrush. Challenges still unresolved: When starting from a rest-open shape (like the upper left skull in the strip below), remodeling the mouth to a narrow "O" is really a pain as the geometry gets really stretched.

(For those experts in zBrush out there, I am sculpting in Dynamesh, but the Layer feature prevents me from re-meshing... leaving me in a quandary... either not using layer or not re-meshing)

Celso Mouth Set strip

I am back!

My exam and few other annoying things now well behind me, I have no more excuse and need to get back at this project. Thanks for all of you who have sent me emails and comments to encourage me to pursue a project which has been sleeping for about a year.

To re-enter gently into the GF atmosphere I have decided to review Celso's head. Chay did a great design, but once 3D printed, its upper skull turned out to be too spherical for a character who is meant to have a long sad, somehow frightened face.

It was also the perfect opportunity for me to learn more about zBrush by revisiting an existing and relatively easy concept.

 Here is the result: on the right, Chay's original design and on the left my revisit. Tell me what you think...

Set building: More props

Door... almost done... just need to write "Manual Calavera" in reverse across the window

 Books... painted

 

Mexican band... work in progress (by the way this prop is not at 1/7th, too small, and just need for a close-up, so this prop is made at 1/1 scale...)

Puppet making: Shoe shine

So... one of the first scene I will have to shoot is a close-up on Celso's shoes...

... and I thought I did a pretty good job with my first ever shoes sculpting attempt...

... until I got on Joshua Flynn's blog and saw this...

How humiliating... and stimulating... So I went back to my clay and managed to get to this...

By the way, the fact that I am sculpting shoes separately from the rest of the body hints that I am changing strategy... looking at Flynn's brothers amazing puppets (discovered thanks to a nice comment posted by Dead End), I really think I am going to give up with latex foam and try to do the puppet in fabrics instead... The above shoes would be used for making a hard mold and a RV silicon cast. looks easier than the foam latex way.

Set Building: for a fistful of props

I had still quite a few items on my prop list which needed to be addressed, somehow... and if possible cheap and fast.

For example, this pile of official DOD self-help books to unleash your inner salesmanship potential

How about that (rigged) vacuum tube messaging system,

I also need shoes for this close-up on Celso's shoe taping nervously as the "reaper" walks in...

And how about this annoying Mexican band press-paper... (err, one musician done, 3 to go)

All these props were made using Super Sculpey Firm, then baked. It's a reasonably cheap way to get done with smaller prop, rather than modelling in 3D and 3D printing.

I still need to model a couple of lamps, a couple of ashtrays, finish the mexican-band press paper, find a way to make a (partial) roof, create the city landscape behind the windows, build the door... and... I know... I really should get on with painting one of these days...

MoldMaking: Crash test dummie

So, given my less than perfect attempt at scultping Manny's body, I am now completely relaxed in pursuing the whole process, calling it a "dry run", and carrying on making all possible mistakes along the way.

This week-end was about creating a plaster mold out of the "frankein-sculpt" I ended up doing. The hobby community seems to have settled on "Ultracal" as being the ultimate plaster for mold-making, but I had to settle to a locally available, fast setting, gypsum-plaster.

The pro's are also using a so-called "Wed-clay" in the process  (see tutorial here from stopmotionmagazine), but here again, I had to settle for some locally available natural water based clay.

Well, in the ambient 35 degree Celsius where I am living, both the clay and the plaster seemed to be drying faster than I wanted. The natural clay was rather messy to deal with, and I had trouble to level it to the divide line of my puppet. As a result I created a lot of undesirable undercuts : whereby the puppet ended up being sunken a little to much in one of the half mold, making it impossible to release without breaking.

Oh, and I also forgot to create "keys" (holes on one side, bumps on the other) to facilitate the placement of the two halves. The plaster turn out to be very soft... and I don't think this mold will resist more than one foam-latex baking.

Well, the result is very amateurish but I think it should be good enough to mess with the foam latex curing part... which seems to be the hardest craft to master in this type puppet making. I will most likely end up with a shapeless blob but I am picking up some ideas to do better on the second try :

1 - Will sculpt the master shape in Supersculpey, instead of air drying clay, then bake it to harden, and will send the shape to pistol lacquer painting (at a motorcycle repair shop), to get the smoothest surface possible

2 - Will use Kid grade synthetic clay (comes almost cheaper than natural one where I leave) in the mold making process, instead of trying with natural clay. I will just warm it a little in a rice cooker to make it very soft. Kid clay worked very well when I made silicon molding for the corners (see earlier post). It will be more forgiving for puppet molding as well... just need lots of it.

3 - I need to settle for a plaster than does not dry so quickly... and maybe ask the plaster shop if there is a way to mix it with more gypsum powder to improve its hardness.

Set Making: Manny's computer in the matter.

Here is another prop 3D-printed from a Google Sketchup rendition.
This is where 3D printing shine... those intricate little keys of the keyboard would have been almost very hard to render using any other modelling technique. If only 3D printing wasn't so expensive... this nice little prop did cost about 40 euros...

The 3D-print price are going down, but I guess that clay and talented traditional sculptors have still a bright future for their craft.

Puppet making: disaster in slow mo

This part of the project is NOT going well at all. Atually, puppet making seems to be my biggest drag at this point of the project.

I posted earlier about my first attempt to sculp a suit in Manny's clay. It looked great... when it was still wet!

The cracks appeared as the clay shrunk on the wire armature. So I made some repair with some putty epoxy, which is very hard to shape. Never mind, I thought, will just sandle everything back in shape, so I patched heavily over the cracks.

But the epoxy turns out to be much harder than the original clay, and sanding back 2 materials of very different hardness proves to be an impossible task.  So here am I... Actually, the picture does it a favor, it really looks worse in reality. So long for the smooth, doll-like, detailed sculpture that made me salivate in the tutorials I tried to emulate. If only I could... lacquer it to give it a smooth surface... or dip it in some sort of all-forgiving-and-viscous-elixir.

Well, since I will probably screw up my first plaster-mold-making attempt I might as well consider this as a crash-test-dummy candidate.

Now, I need to find some non-shrinking clay and some damn good sculpture 101 tutorial.

Celso's skull 3D print (1rst test)

Hey, Chay! This one is for you!

Prop making: Molding corners

Earlier in this blog, I posted my attempt to modeling the art-deco ceiling corners in Manny's office.

I sent the shape to my favorite 3D printer and received a scaled 3D print for that shape as shown below. I could have asked the print of 4 identical pieces and be done with it, but... 3D print is expensive, and this relatively simple geometrical shape was a good practice target to learn the craft of Silicon mold making.

I show below the original 3D print of the master shape. Then below a Silicon mold made of this shape. And last row the resin cast of 4 corners made in resin.

The result is good enough for a decorative prop of this kind. A little sanding, a little painting, and those four pieces should look OK in the set.

The whole process was made in a week-end, with locally available chemical products (RTV Silicon, Resin, and their respective hardener), and it was fun to do with my daughter. However the result would probably not be good enough for a more intricate design requiring a higher level of precision. I made all the beginner's mistakes, as usual, and I will probably do better next time. Which was the point of the whole exercise... I could have skipped this detail from the set with no much visible difference in the final movie. But this project is as much about learning techniques I am unfamiliar with as it is about the final product, the movie.

There are plenty of excellent tutorial around about this RTV Silicon mold making, so I will spare you with the details. However, always happy to answer any question, from layman to layman.

Animation test: Lip Sync test

Testing my new (still virtual) replacement mouth set on original audio... The Sync work was done under Dragonframe and the video was then built from still image using VirtualDub (a nice little free software).

Puppet Making : Mouth replacement set (trial 2)

A few weeks ago, I have presented on this blog a mouth replacement set for Manny made by hand in Sculpey clay. But I was still not very happy with the outcome: the match between the lower jaw and the upper skull was approximate, leaving big gaps which will prove to be hard to conceal.

At the same time, I was intrigued by Celso's skull made by Chay in a 3D software that he recommended to me: zBrush.

Unlike a conventional 3D authoring software, zBrush lets you sculpt intuitively shapes without worrying about meshes of polygon : it's a bit like using some digital clay.

I decided to give a try on a trial version, starting from Tom Beg's original 3D model skull for Manny.

As you can see, I had a lot of fun with it. It took a little while to get through the beginner's learning curve, but once you get used to a few (among many) brushes it gets really intuitive.

The advantage of this method, would be to be able to make a very clean, precise, and consistent cut between the skull and the mouth set, and get the pieces sent to a 3D printer. The fit will be almost perfect, and the remaining contact line will be more easy to conceal in post-production.

Now it gets really tempting to have a set of upper skull (i.e. with different position of eyebrows), to de-multiply the possibilities facial expression. But I am getting ahead of myself... as my father always taught me: "le mieux est l'enemi du bien".

Puppet making: Chay's take on Celso's skull

Celso's CG 3D sculpt by Chay

Yesterday was my birthday, and incidentally I had a great gift awaiting in my inbox. Chay is a very talented graphic designer and a GF fan. Chay has apparently mastered a radically innovative 3D modelling software called zBrush which allows you to sculp model pretty much the same way you would with clay (adding matter, bloking out, smoothing, chiselling).
I approached him after seeing a great fan-art 3D rendition of Manny's character, and he generously accepted to help this project.
It's always embarrassing to ask an artist to deliver a work in the same style as another artist, but I wanted some design consistency with Manny's existing skull model and I sheepishly asked him if he could stay close to Tom Beg's own fan art rendition of Manny's skull.
I am really amazed by the model that he sent me, not only it is beautifully executed, but it also falls right in the stylistic "spot" which I was hoping for.
This GF-Fan community is amazing.

Puppet Making: The making of replacement mouth

After careful consideration, Tob Beg's original 3D model, as great as it is, would not do the trick in its lower part for stop mo animation purpose. Even without the teeth, I could not find a way to convincingly model the mouth within its model. I took the decision to remove the lower part of his model, and to remodel a jaw/chin that would give me a little more breathing space for modeling my replacement mouth set.

10 units of this rather unimpressive piece of molded resin has were cast after an original jaw-chin shape that I did in clay to complement the now mutilated model shown in pic 1. Having 10 identical pieces like this will allow me (I hope) to make all my replacement mouth on the same baseline. If I am molding each replacement mouth separately, I am afraid that the shape will change too much from one shot to another while Manny's speaking, making the animation very jerky. OK, it might still be jerky in the end, but at least I made an effort to avoid it!

I am using SuperSculpey Firm. Not my choice, but because this is the only pro clay that I can find around. It does the trick, however. I simply roll a piece of Super Scupey flat so has to get a skin of about 1mm think.

That skin is used to wrap the jaw piece around.

It's really like wrapping a gift. The extra material is cut away with the hobby knife.

This outer-skin made of Sculpey will be our sculpting surface. Being one millimeter thick we can choose to either sculpt-in the existing layer, as shown above for the teeth...

... or add material on the skin to add details, such as shown above. No it's not a Mexican mustache, it's the beginning of the surrounding lips.

Now you see what I mean. I could have left the lips protubing like this, giving it a comical effect reminiscent of the animation Aardman Animations (Wallace & Grommit, Chicken run)

But instead I have opted for sinking the lips into the skin as shown above... hoping not to make a too wide departure from the original Manny, who, after all, had pretty flat mouth features!

Puppet Making: Early tackle on Celso

"Do you recognize any of these skeletons Ma'am?"

The day-job has been in the way lately. But the project keeps moving slowly and surely : The set needs to be dressed up and some materials have already been identified. I am thinking of using some snooker-table type of textile to emulate the dark blue carpet in the office, while doing the walls by simply pritting out a pre-shadowed wall texture on cardboard paper and gluing the sheets it to the wall, like a normal wall-paper.


I have also started to think about Celso Flores, a minor character of the game, but who is the main dialog partner of Manny during the intro-movie that we want to re-create.  While both Manny and Celso are about the same height, Celso is much more anatomically correct than Manny (yet far less alluring!), with higher pelvis, shoulder, and a far less elongated skull. This difference of body shape will affect the armature design , which will soon follow.

Manny's skull in the matter

At last, after weeks a fumbling with 3D images, I am touching concrete, material, stuff! I have just received my 3D prints for Manny's head, based on Tom Beg's original modelling.

What a satisfaction to hold Manny's skull in my hand.


As you can see there are 2 models: one, based on the original artwork from Tom, with teeth, and the other one without teeth. The latter will be the master shape based on which I will make a Silicon mold to create many other heads. The mouth cavity will be used to place sculpted replacement mouths to give Manny's ability to articulate via lips-sync.

A word about 3D printing: I have in fact tried two well established 3D printer : shapeways and i.materialize. Both companies had kick-ass customer support and delivered high quality product on time for about the same price. Shapeways' product smoothness was however slightly better... but very close.

Unfortunately, 3D printing remains fairly expensive and can be used only for fairly small objects. Manny's computer desk for example, would cost several hundreds dollars to 3D print because of its bulky volume. That said, for small, intricate shapes, such as puppets head or Manny's computer, 3D printing is an option to get the props done.

Original fan-art by Thomas Beg

Removing Manny's teeth

In this earlier post, I marveled at the 3D remodeling made by Thomas Beg as part of its CG arts studies. Well, I contacted Thomas to beg (no pun intended) for the source file. Not only he replied, but he very generously sent the Maya and Obj source file of his model. Well, thanks Thomas, that's very cool of you. The source files were in Maya. I have not clue about 3d modelling and this software looks very scary. I downloaded the demo version which gave me 30 days to inspect the model (even though Thomas had given me the Obj export as well). And.. aha!, I discovered that the teeth were modeled as separate object and very easy to remove! A teeth-less skull could prove to be very useful for mouth replacement purpose. Next step was simply to export the teeth-less Manny from Maya into an Obj-file, resize it using a cheap 20 USD tool called Accutrans 3D (I was incapable of finding the scaling/sizing function in Maya using a good old metric system) and then send the model to a 3D printer, place the order... et voilà! I should receive Manny's head within 2 weeks. This 3D printed model will become the master model based on which I will sculpt the replacement mouths, and also do a silicon mold for creating many more heads for replacement and other puppets.

Inspiration

Amazing work from Thomas Beg

I recently stumbled upon a quite amazing modern 3D rendering of Manny Calavera's skull done by Thomas Beg, apparently as part of of his Graphic Arts, Animation studies.

This model has just the right amount of detail and modernity, while retaining the essence of the original character. It would be an excellent start for sculpting the head  a Manny. The mouth might be a little too aggressive thought, but the skull sculpture will not get into mouth details. I intended to use mouth replacement for lips syncing.

Anyway, thanks a lot to Thomas for his inspirational work that could spin a whole new style in the adaptation of the character's skull. If only he had the time to give me his contemporary 3D interpretation of Celso Flores, we would be almost set for puppet making the main characters of the intro cut-scene.