Some words about Down the Rabbit's hole

Hey guys,

another project is finished and I would like to say a few words about the production. After D.Va does Overwatch, which was pretty straighforward, gonzo style movie I wanted to do a more story heavy one.

I was also very intrigued by the size difference in DDO and decided to focus on that in a project. It occured to me that Alice in Wonderland would be the perfect vessel and the possibility to dress up Sarah in a bunny costume was a nice bonus.

I also changed Sarah hairstyle, she was the last of my OCs who still didn't use the particle based hair. In retrospect I think I should have chosen different hairstyle, but I think the Tomboy look suits her.

Another thing I wanted to do was to do a project that takes place outside. With that I would only need an HDRI for light that would speed up the lighting and rendering dramatically. What I didn't realize is that would also mean I need to set up a large good looking environment that turned out to be pretty memory heavy. Also I feel like the lighting ended up looking kinda meh. It was ok but nothing to write home about.

I also wanted to use motion capture for the movie, even while writing the script I was more adventurous in describing situations that I felt I would not be able to animate, but I thought I could just mocap with an actress. That turned out to be a major hurdle, I spent a lot of time trying to set everything up and my dual kinect setup in the end didn't work for some reason.

I was considering buying a pretty expensive mocap suit, but the shipping time, cost and overall quality of the recordings I have seen made me change my mind. In the end I had to animate everything by hand, which seemed impossible at first. Fortunately I finally caved and decided to record a reference. If you ever wondered, it's extremely awkward at first, acting on camera, especially with the kind of scenarios I had in mind 😳. But eventually it became easier and now I am fairly comfortable recording the reference.

Another aspect is that I am a guy recording a girl's movement (even though that girl is packing). So the movement is not always right. However usually at least the timing and general idea is correct and it's a great starting point.

Even though I have something like a decade of animating experience, I've always been animating very specific stuff and I always knew my limits and was wary of pushing them. That means that I am actually a pretty sub-par animator, at least when it comes to full body locomotion and anything non-looped. However everything can be learned and I feel much more comfortable animating more difficult situations even though I need a lot of practice.

Most of the story animation has some issues, but I am pretty happy with it as I think I achieved the best possible with my ability, and improved that ability in the process.

Another fun thing was working with clothing and cloth physics. I designed Hana's outfit with that in mind, and I also wrote the script so she gets rid of it ASAP 😂 I was pretty surprised with how well it looked, but it still needed a lot of fiddling where I wouldn't want to have a character wearing piece using cloth physics for the entire movie.

Last thing I should probably mention is the fluid physics. With flip fluid addon that I am using they are definitely more usable, but I still struggle to get a good result just with that and need to do some manual adjustments.

Overall I am pretty happy with the project, I learned a lot even though I grossly underestimated the difficulty as per usual 😅