Final Story Details

Now with the changes to my story complete, I feel it appeals to the target demographic more. Children would enjoy the cartoon style and bright colours and instead of being a bit mischievous using bait to get the hat, he is now much more up front and obvious about his villainy by being more physical.

As for the story, it will hopefully go like this:
(All mouth shapes are referred to in the way I found in my research which I have posted earlier on this blog)

• Screen fades in as Crabs is in the centre of the screen. He has a shell on his back and is squeezing out of it. His mouth is clenched and eyes shut tight, showing effort. The shell pops off and his eyes open slightly and mouth relaxes, showing relief. Crabs scuttles to the right as the screen cross fades to the next screen.
• The bird is on the right side of the screen, twitching and squawking.
• Crabs scuttles on from the left with a neutral expression.
• Crabs' eyes lock on to the hat. It is his object of desire, so his eyes widen and pupils dilate. His mouth morphs to the 'OOO' position and he raises his claws to his mouth.
• As the thought of taking the hat crosses his mind, his eyes narrow and has a wide, toothy grin. His eyes will shift quickly side to side in a mischievous way.
• Crabs steps closer to the bird, and his eyes focus on the Seagull's eyes intently. Still narrow eyed, his mouth changes to the 'angry' position and he clicks his raised claws in a form of taunt.
• Crabs mouth changes to the frown position, eyes staying narrow as he quickly scuttles forward and nips at the bird's legs.
• The bird hops off screen in pain and the hat topples from it's head.
• As soon as the bird begins to leave shot, Crab's attention is straight back to the hat. His eyes will follow the hat through the air and to the ground. His mouth will change back to 'OOO' and his eyes widen again.
• Crab's face turns to joy as he finds the hat in his possession. His mouth changes to 'big smile' and his eyes return to neutral.
• He picks up the hat and throws it onto his back. His face changes to a smug expression. Eyes closed and a big closed smile. He scuttles off and the screen fades to black.
• The screen fades back in and crabs has a neutral expression.
• Some bacon on a line come into shot and Crab's expression changes back to 'OOO' with wide eyes and dilated pupils. Crabs LOVES bacon. He raises his claws and clicks them in excitement.
• Eyes slightly widened and mouth changes to a wide toothy grin.
• He grabs the bacon and pulls it towards him.
• The string goes tight as the bacon is a lure from children going crabbing. Crab's eyes go very wide and pupils contract. His mouth changes to 'big frown'.
• His mouth then morphs to anger as his eyes narrow.
• His eyes look the line up and down and head reaches forward and snips it.
• His face changes to a wide, toothy smile while his eyes remain narrow, giving him a menacing look.
• Crabs looks up and rears onto his back legs. He raises his claws in the air and waves them, along with the bacon in a taunt.
• Crabs looks at his bacon with glee. His bottom eyelids will be raised and he will have a smile.
• Finally, he scuttles off screen and fade out.

I intend to make use of various camera angles, particularly close ups to convey the facial animation clearly. However, I will not use extreme close ups as my earlier research made some points as to why that type of shot does not translate well to this style of animation.

All of the models are finished, and the rigging and morphers are nearly there so I think I am on track.

Story Changes

After getting some opinions on my initial storyboards, it seems the antagonist is not villainous enough. The series of events leads the viewer to feel sorry for the main character, Crabs, rather than disliking him.

Firstly, instead of Crabs being mischievous and sly but tricking the seagull with a fish, he will taunt the bird, giving the proverbial 'finger' (claw?). He will then go and attack the seagull by pinching at its legs. This leads the story to the same effect, as the bird hops away in pain and the hat topples off it's head.

 

 

Later on in the story, instead of getting caught by the line and losing the hat he attacked the bird to get, he will grab the bacon, but notice the line. He will cut the line and look up to once again taunt.

Rig Test

Using CAT, I have used the crab rig and fit it to my character. I am having problems sorting out the envelopes so the joints move properly without quite a lot of deformation. It is a pain! I'm also having problems working out how to attach the eyes to the body so they all move as one. This is difficult because I need to keep the FFD box working, so I can't just use the attach function.

However, what I have done it got the character moving properly within the basic walking animation of the rig.

It is quite a fast walk here, but that's just a case of extending the time scale. This was achieved by applying a path constraint to a dummy box. The crab mesh and rig was then set to walk within this dummy box.

The dummy box's rotation is off a bit in the picture above, but by rotating this box, the character is rotated, so the crab could walk up and over hills, and most importantly, be set to walk sideways like a real crab with no effort.

I think I am at a good stage with this module because I have my story set out, the majority of the modelling done and made a start with the animation, Although I haven't started much with the morpher for facial expressions, I am confident that I can get it to work without too much trouble due to work with it on previous modules.

Character Profile

To have an effective character in general, not necessarily just a villain, they need to have background information to make them seem more personable. So, here is a profile for my character who will simply go by the name of 'Crabs'

Name: 'Crabs'.
Personality: Crabs is a mischievous, crafty, sly and selfish (shellfish) kleptomaniac.
Appearance: He is a red hermit crab with his expressive eyes on stalks and four round white teeth.
Occupation: Doing crab stuff.
Affiliations: None as he is a solitary hermit crab.
Goal: To find a new home as he has recently outgrown his old shell.
Home: Crabs is currently between homes.
Allies: None.
Enemies: None in particular, but often gets on the wrong side of complete strangers with his thievery.
Likes: Bacon, top hats, commotion and salsa music.
Dislikes: Birds and crabs with bigger claws than him.
Skills: Exceptional thief.
Weaknesses: Bacon!
Powers & Abilities: Kung-fu grip and juggling.
Weapons: His pincers and will occasionally bite with his teeth.
Fate: To steal a top-hat...and get away with it.
Quote: "I can resist everything except temptation. And bacon."

Setting the scene

The ground is a plane with a sand bitmap applied to it and the sky is a bitmap placed in the environment slot. The sea is a box with a multi sub-object material applied where one is the water and the other is the foam of the breaking waves. This will not be animated.

There are no rigs in these models yet, so these are just test renders to get the idea of the setting across. This first shot is the crab first noticing the seagull and his rather fancy hat.

Here is a shot of the crab closer and he has a menacing grin on his face. The seagull is looking away, oblivious to the crafty crustacean. Using the look-at constraint allows the eyes to be positioned right at the hat. The eyelids are pulled closer together and combined with his grin, makes him look suitably mischievous. 

Here is a higher angle of the same scene, but with a very basic box-modelled boat just to create more atmosphere. 

A daylight system was used for these scenes with mental ray enabled which makes it look brighter and more lively. The sharper shadows behind the boat created by the daylight system make the sea more obvious as being flat, but this very minor issue is not the focus of the task anyway.

Modelling the Seagull

This time with a reference plate, I modelled the seagull in a similar way to the crab's body. I started with a small plane and just sat for a while extruding faces and positioning them to get the rough shape.

I used symmetry and turbosmooth every once in a while to check the shape.

Here's the seagull modelled and textured. At this stage it has creepy, human-like feet. I changed this later on because the looked too strange!

Also relevant to the story, I modelled a monocle starting with a cylinder and using the inset and extrude tools.

The chain was created by making a spline and moving it around so it was the right shape. I then created a thin torus. The torus was then placed in an array following the line using the spacing tool which is found at Tools > Align > Spacing Tool.

He also looks pretty good in a top hat.

Building The Antagonist Cont.

By following the shape of the rig, I created the legs out of spheres, and scaled them to be longer and thinner.

The claws also started as spheres, but a little more vertex manipulation was involved to make them look better.

With the crab's right side of legs and claw done, they were attached to the body. This caused the symmetry modifier to apply to them too, completing the shape of the crab. Some soft selection was used to make a few lumps on the crab's back to give him more character.

And, relevant to the story, I modelled a top hat, starting with a cylinder and extruding some faces. I modelled the top hat before the bird because the hat needed to be scaled to both the crab and bird, as they will both need to wear it without it being over / undersized.

Building The Antagonist

I started the crab by building eyes in a similar way to the eyes we made in a tutorial. A sphere for the eye with the hemisphere increased a little to make the black pupil. This method allows the pupil to be dilated and contracted easily. The eyelids are also spheres which are slightly larger, and then cut in half. An FFD box spacewarp is used to manipulate the shape of the eyes while retaining the ability for the eyes to be opened and closed just by rotating them. The stalks are then cylinders with a bend modifier.

The body will be made by starting with a small plane and extruding the edges until the rough shape is formed. It will be completed with a symmetry modifier and turbosmooth.

After looking at the CAT tools in 3DS Max, I found that there is a crab rig already, which is handy! I put this into the workspace and scaled it to my model. With this, I can use it to get the proportion and angle of the legs looking right.

When animating, it is important to have the eyes always focussed on something on or off screen, so I research the look-at constraint.

Binding the eyes with this small sphere as a look-at constraint makes the eyes following the sphere wherever it is. This will help make the crab more expressive.

Developed Storyboard

Developing from my initial storyboard, I drew out another with more focus on facial expressions and actions. The darkened lines between some frames represents where I will create a new scene in 3DS Max so it won't need to be rendered all in one. Scenes will be edited together in Premiere Pro.

With the storyboard done, I can begin to model characters and a basic bit of scenery.

Existing Characters

Of the existing animations of crabs, the most famous is probably Sebastian from Disney's 'The Little Mermaid' (1989). He is highly expressive and has a large face in comparison to his body. He has no nose, but the face is still very human-like in shape which allows it show more powerful expressions. Having two claws is especially useful as the character can gesture with two limbs, while having (multiple) legs to support the body still, which is also human-like. The character will need to express human emotion, so it should be more effective having these features.

Some 3D models of crabs already out there are very realistic, somewhat realistic and cartoon-like. For the purpose of a children's villain, a cartoon style would work better. It would also be simpler to model and texture. This will all serve as inspiration when modelling.

Coming up with a story

I started coming up with ideas around the crab character and various situations he could be in, along with how he would look and show emotion.

The summary of the above image is basically that the crab would be a mischievous thief going after a certain item and failing in the process. Potential items of desire were a pearl inside the oyster or a hat on an unsuspecting bird. 

I had a few ideas about the pearl and sketched a (very) rough storyboard with some notes.

However, I, along with a few others who saw my ideas liked the quirkiness of a bird in a hat. On this premise, I drew up a basic storyboard of the idea.

Generating Ideas

My initial thought on a character to be a villain in this animation was going to be rather stereotypical. I was going to go down the route of an intelligent, megalomaniac who wants everything and is hated by everyone. Possibly having minions to do his dirty work. He could be humanoid in shape and size but robotic. I made a model a while ago that made me think of this idea, but noticed his face may not be very expressive due his jaw being on a hinge and having no eyebrows or eyelids.

Afterwards, rather than redesigning, I decided that I didn't want to go quite so cliche and had a dramatic change of idea and decided to appeal more to the other part of the brief which is that this villain is to be aimed at children. Following suit of many existing children villains, I decided to make it an animal. For no reason other than it was the first thing I drew, I stuck with the idea of a crab.

I had a few ideas for a story so I began developing from there.