HARDCORE MODELING!: 80's cartoon: Smurf madness!

#81

Hey Joel,

many thanks for sharing those tree bark alphas. They’ll surely come in handy one way or another.

I’ve been thinking about your scale/perspective issue. The only way I think you can solve it, is by really setting storytelling priorities and focusing the shot on those.

I also checked with an old issue of " Johann et Pirlouit, La Guerre Des Sept Fontaines" how Peyo himself handled the issues when humans and smurfs are in the same “shot”. If the humans have priority, the shot is framed on them, while the smurfs are tiny. If the smurfs get the focus, all people and things human-made completely take on the role of props and are cut off as mere references, unless there is direct interaction. Perhaps this helps a bit.

Cheers!

#82

My pleasure for the Alphas, Felix.

Your suggestion Helped a ton figuring out my shot, however the scale issue I’ve been having has been software related, not composition related.

Basically, the smurfs were so small compared to everything else, that the camera would go screwy if I tried to focus on them. A slight pan would send the camera reeling (no pun intended). When I delete the environment, I have no problems, but as soon as there’s a huge contrast between mesh scale, it seems that the camera gets funky.

Anyway, I’ve deleted about 90% of the stump at this point, and have been left with this shot:

And a SS of the scene:

Here is a description of the global picture in my head:
There is an old tree in the forest that lost a branch due to whatever reason necessary. The wound created by the broken branch got somewhat infected, and the inner “meat” of the wood rotted away to create a hole in the trunk, similar to this, only it never healed so well:

Due to the humidity and decay, mushrooms started growing within this wound, And The Smurfs have made it their home.

The mushrooms will all change, and picture rope bridges and vine ladders connecting the funghi, as well as a spiraling wooden ramp going around the inside of the tree, with multiple ramps swooping down to the different shrooms. The idea is that every mushroom will have a little shack on it belonging to a different smurf.

And now back to Character detail…Finally!

-Rage

#83

normally smurfs don’t freak me out…but these ones do…creepy little guys

keep up the good work

#84

Lol thanks robo.

This is the type of mushroom I’ll eventually be modeling.


It is called Laetiporus sulphureus, Laetiporus cincinnatus, Sulphur Shelf, and, affectionately, The chicken of the Woods. They grow in brakets which can way up to 100 lbs, are not poisonous, and are quite edible and taste like chicken (matrix, anyone?).

Wikipedia has this to say about them:

It is most commonly found on wounds of trees, mostly oak, though it is also frequently found on yew, cherry wood, sweet chestnut, and willow. Laetiporus often produce dry rot in the host on which they grow.

This description seemed to go well with my environment “back story”. I will take a few liberties with Mother Nature’s design, of course ( :thumbsup: Mother Nature, for coming up with weird stuff like this).

1-Rather than brackets, they will be individual mushrooms.
2-They grow on superficial wounds, rather than the type of wound that I have blocked out, but oh well.
3)They can be up to a foot in diameter, so either They will be smaller than in real life, or this is a HUGE tree I’m dealing with here.
4) They will have to be flattened as much as possible to make them a viable platform for little shacks.

Alright, 3 weeks left and I got 9 Smurfs to model and a village to build. Let’s hope there are no more bumps in the road.

-Rage

#85

Glad I could help. :slight_smile:

Aha, funny that it would do that. In Maya I usually only get rather extreme OpenGL errors on stuff like that.

Your idea with the tree and the “chicken”-mushroom sounds great. Thanks for the little piece of reference and education.

Cheers!

#86

Unfortunately it’s not as easy as tweaking the far and near clip planes :frowning: in modo. I’ve worked with many apps, but learned in maya originally. I’ve always found that Maya’s camera attributes were the easiest to work with still today.

Well I was going to start character detailing but it seems that my sudden new wave of inspiration was reserved for the environment for the moment. So I blocked out how I wanted it to look.
Basically I just extruded the edges of a flattened cylinder in odd ways to get the wavy mushroom edges (which I haven’t sculpted yet). I then duplicated that mushroom, scaled it and rotated etc, moved a few points to randomize. Colors are temporary and are in place for contrast only. Also there is some wacky artifacts in my Normal map. If someone recognizes the problem and knows a solution please post it :beer:

and an ss of the setup:

More to come soon

-Rage

#87

Ok so I’ve continued and blocked out the environment to a point where I feel I can go back and forth between continuing the environment and character detailing. It doesn’t look like much has been done, but there was quite a bit of troubleshooting (nothing specific, so I won’t bother with describing it all) and trying out different techniques to maximize efficiency within modo. I’ll list a few points, though.

  1. I was created a displacement map for each mushroom, to see what rendertime would be compared to only geometry. It was balls, so I imported high-ish resolution meshes to see if it would be faster. It was. much. each mushroom is around 70k polys right now, but I will reimport lower rez at a later time for efficiency sake.

2)Previous Normal map problems on the tree: status: fixed. I don’t know what the problem was, here, but I regenerated a normal map using tris in zmapper (rather than quads) I have no idea what this export option is, but it did the trick. I’ll look into it in the future, as for now, well, looks good/is good.

3)I was going to build a rig for my generic smurf at one point in XSI. Turns out I have to build 3, because I already had Smurfette blocked out and ready for detailing, as well as Hefty Smurf. Both these characters had extensive modifications from the generic smurf and I didn’t want to do it all over again. Faster to build a new Rig. My Rig is prety bad and basic. But it enables me to pose a character, edit (very basically) the weights so that I get only light deformations in the form, export the mesh, then reconstruct the forms that need attention. All in all, I find this to be an effective workflow for what I am trying to accomplish.

Here’s a WIP render of the environment as it stands now.

And a pose for Smurfette. She’s giving hefty the “Talk to the hand” gesture, as he will be lifting a weight with one arm and flexing the other, trying to impress her.

-Rage

#88

Lol, love the Smurfette pose. “Oh no you didn’t Hefty!”
Really taking shape Rage, diggin’ it so far.

#89

lol I am so waiting for a Super Mutant to come crashing around the corner! :smiley:

#90

@Wyatt: Lol thanks mate.

@Oberyn: Perhaps a blend between Gargamel and the Hunchback of Notre-dame, If I have time.

There are a few things I would like to get done as a mini side fun project for this entry, time permitted.

  1. Gargamel and/or Azrael.
  2. A Ninja Smurf Hanging upside on a rope from a mushroom (posed like spidey).

Anyway, I got Hefty Posed and threw him into a scene with Smurfette. It works for me. Does it work for you? Ignore the terrible geometry deformations, they are artifacts of poor weights from an even poorer rig.

My goal is to get all my Smurfs’ poses blocked out, then individually sculpt them until they’re just right (or until I run out of time).
As mentioned above, I had to build 3 rigs so I’m getting grumpy about it. Smurfettes is Done, Hefty’s is done (this rig can be transfered over to Vanity’s mesh, as they have the same topo).
Now I still have to build a rig and envelope my generic Smurf. Once that’s done I should be able to get all the Smurfs Blocked out this week and then onto a platform to make sure they go well together.
I was originally going to make 10 smurfs, and I’d still like to, however it might crowd the scene too much. I’ll have to see.

-Rage

#91

I Compulsively had to get one more done. Here we have Harmony Smurf (Not Stoner Smurf, if that’s what you’re thinking). I thought that seeing as I was making these smurfs a little more…tribal, then rather than a trumpet, Harmony Smurf would be playing the Diggery-Do ( And not a gigantic peace pipe, if that’s what your’re thinking). He will eventually have very puffy cheeks

-Rage

#92

Ignoring. :smiley: I think for the Smurfette pose to make more sense Hefty should probably be looking at her and maybe have him flexing his right arm up. Like “Hey baby, you like the gun show.” “Get lost sucka!” Looking great Rage.

#93

Thanks Wyatt. You are Right, of course. Hefty does need to be looking at her more, Perhaps at her chest? Anyway, I’ll figure something out.
PS Welcome back the challenge :buttrock:

Ok, so before getting deep into work tonight I thought I’d take an hour or so to organize myself, figure out where I am, and what I’ve got left to do.

So far, I’ve got a good block-out for the environment which I am happy with. There’s some images of it on the previous page for those who missed it. Chef Smurf is nearly complete, and I have poses blocked out for Smurfette, Hefty Smurf, Harmony Smurf and Handy Smurf.
Here they are:

Hefty is Posed to be mac’ing on Smurfette, who is posed to give him the cold shoulder, Harmony Smurf is posed to Whale away on the diggerydo, Hefty Smurf is posed so weird because he will have just set off an explosion in a box, courtesy of Jokey.

What I have left to do:

Characters:

  1. -Pose Jokey Smurf
    -Pose Papa Smurf
    -Pose Brainy Smurf
    -Pose Grouchy Smurf
    -Pose Vanity Smurf
    -Iron out all the bad deformations caused from my poor rig, which should go relatively quick using modo’s mesh sculpting and my bamboo fun.
    2)Detail all the smurfs (except for Chef)
    3)Create clothes and accessories for the following (where they will differ from the standard pants)-Most of these smurfs will have a unique hat
    -Jokey (he will look like a jester)
    -Papa (I may put him in a robe or some such. He IS a wizard, after all)
    -Brainy (He will need glasses and a book)
    -Handy (He will need a pencil in his ear, and a saw or a ladder or something around him)
    -Harmony (Some kind of crude tux, like a conductor? I’m not sure on this one yet-suggestions welcome.)
    -Vanity (He will be set up to look metero-sexual)

Environment:

-Rebuild the hut using the existing model as a guide.
-Create some clutter, such as ladders and rope bridges to other, less obvious mushrooms, Hanging vines and the like.
-Detail the mushrooms (This will be done in modo using mesh sculpting-no displacement maps. Then I will bring the highrez model into zbrush for creating normal and bump maps).

Looking at this list is daunting, but many of these things will be relatively quick, such as the poses. Once they are out of the way, I will finally be able to get back into zbrush for some character detailing.

-Rage

#94

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#95

Here we have the last of the smurfs posed.They all have the same expression, I worked on the poses only, and there will be small edits on those during the detailing process, but for now, even grouchy is smiling :smiley:

Now I gotta get to work fixing bad deformations.

-Rage

PS: This has nothing to do with Modeling, this challenge, cartoons, or anything whatsoever with this thread, but you guys should check out this link if you don’t know about it. Whenever I’m frustrated I go here to browse and by the time I close the window in Chrome I always feel in a lighter mood.

http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/

#96

Lol, great link. And those guys get paid for that.

#97

Haha I know. There’s a great one a few months back from the national enquirer that was a picture of Beyonce with 3 arms. They photo-chopped in a raised arm, burnt in a pitstain, and cried “OMG-BEYONCE HAS SWEATY ARMPITS”, only they never removed her real arm, which was still chilling at her side.

I’m concentrating on Papa Smurf for now Because I’m eager to get back to sculpting, and seeing as Papa Smurf is 543 years old, he’ll be prety wrinkly.

I went through the base mesh and fixed up all the major areas, even what you can’t see cuz it’s behind his robe. Gave him his accessories and clothes, and am taking him into ZB now.
As for his robe, well, I’ve never in my life even attempted to hand model cloth, and to be frank, I’m a little intimidated. Tips and tricks would be most welcome (master orco?).
I deleted the beard for the render because I didn’t like it.

Wires:

Render:

-Rage

#98

Wow this is coming along. Even though it will give me nightmares I cant wait to see the finished thing. :slight_smile:

#99

don’t like it at all and honestly cannot understand why most of the other commenters dig it that much. i don’t have a problem with re-interpreting the smurfs in an unusual and creepy stype but this looks simply very amateurish.

#100

What do you think about chef Smurf? I believe that’s the only one close to being done. I wouldn’t judge it by a WIP yet.