Spontaneous pig and horse (and triceratops cloth)

"What the heck are you doing!?" well, frankly I was feeling a bit burnt out dealing with the bronto thing and that dang curve rigging/animating, I did some lip-sync and cloth sim for the triceratops with the VA's stuff but the cloth sim was just incredibly demotivating, a lot of the old "bake and wait" and while I was doing that, I was thinking about the pig character I did awhile ago. The model was mostly done, but I didn't rig it at all.

And I was thinking about characters for a demo reel, and I've always had this idea for a pig character named "Duncan" who's trying to break into the adult entertainment world professionally. I think it'd be fun if that was part of some lip-sync work where he's talking about his aspirations, but in a nervous way that would lend itself nicely to expressive animation.

Blah blah anyway I also had an idea for the horse butt I made awhile ago, like the first finished 3d animation I did, where the butt is using a toy, and a character is watching, like they're really into horse rear specifically. Then I remembered the pig and that's when the pieces fell into place... I'll finish the pig model, touch up the horse butt model, and make something quick with that.

Here's the pig:

The head is a bit odd at some angles, but pretty nice at most angles. Enough to where I can work around it and then later figure out how I'll fix the head. The skin originally was really plastic-y, and on a character who doesn't have scales or noticeable fur or anything as a form of noisey detail, I decided to take a more human style approach to the skin and added freckles. The freckles are just two voronoi textures, color ramp, vertex color map to determine where they are, etc... nothing crazy

The hands were originally more generic looking, I think I chopped them off a free model from CG-cookie because at the time I wasn't confident enough to think of more pig-like hands, but now I am, so he has pig-inspired hands.

Next, is the horse character who's the object of the pig (s) desire. Now I have a lot to say about this fellow because the process of making this guy involved a lot weird methodology.

So to start with, this is the horse butt as I left after the first animation (with the donk getting AV'd)

And I did some tests and kept thinking... it would be nice if there was more of a body to work with. I started to do an upper body.

The white blob is the chest sculpt I retopologized, the gray parts are stuff I took from the donkey model I made awhile ago and worked into the body to save time. The hands I did from scratch to be more horse-inspired, so they have little hoof ends:

That was also done with a quick sculpt and retopo. And the head, I started to do a head from scratch, but I wanted to take a short cut, so I downloaded a horse base mesh from blend swap and messed with it's proportions a bit.

That's what I cut off ^

I filled holes and re-meshed, messed with the shape until it looked good enough to start re-topologizing.

Here's the re-topo, filled the mouth, added nostrils, but I just did not like the brow and eye area. I thought "you know, the brow/eyes looked pretty good on that donkey model I did awhile ago..."

I took this part, copied it, and worked it into the existing horse head.

The nostrils I'm still not sure how much I like them, but it's fine for now.

The hair is the same approach (pretty much) as the dragon and camera imp hair. Polygon based hair with a cage mesh to deform it.

Though, this time, I made the cage by re-meshing the hair and expanding it, to get a more accurate shape. Works pretty well! But the hair is very heavy... the full detail hair is over 900,000 triangles! The one seen here I decimated to be a much more workable, but still heavy 90,000.

It's at this point I'm like... dang, that was a lot more work than I wanted to do originally! But at least he has a body and head.

(Obviously the material for the horses' skin isn't final. It's just diffuse and vertex colors. But I wanted to give an update on this stuff.)

This post is already all over the place, but the last thing I'll talk about in this post is the triceratops. I mentioned before about the cloth sim, it was a huge pain to get it working well with all the weird stuff going on (like, the cloth between the arm and the body required a lot of tweaking of the collision mesh to not break the sim!) but it ended up being pretty good I think, for an amateur production! I'll do some more lip-syncing for it soon.

Also, the bronto stuff, I still want to do that at some point, I might do the shower thing, but I might do the pig thing as this month's animation instead, since it's more like stuff I've done previously and should be able to animate without much complication, toy in hole action...

Showing this pic again because I think this turned out pretty good, compositionally!