The Sink Faerie - The Good and Bad Faeries

MOODBOARD

The mood board above is all  the references that I gathered and put on a Pureref board to easily reference portions of each picture so I could pull from each into my model. The artist reference section was purely built by looking at creators who had a similar style and realism that would help me create a mostly realistic looking character. The animal reference was what I accumulated to ensure the character had a sense of realism more because it could look like a combined hybrid of the referenced animals, and allowed the model to have a more believable anatomy. The anatomy section was a look at how different muscles look where the model will be most weighted toward, making sure he has muscle groups that are more accurate to the majority of bipedal creatures. I thought having reference for teeth and claws would help as well as I was aiming to have the model incorporate these in the final design.

PREVIS SCULPT

Using ZBrush I created the initial model which was a rough sculpt to replicate Brian Froud's concept of the Sink Faerie, being posed in a way I thought would accurately represent it. As I went forward I completely rebuilt the model with low detail but encouraging the anatomy so it would straightaway have the anatomy I would like, I then used a boolean operation in ZBrush to combine all individual meshes into one solid mesh that I could sculpt to recreate the original design more. I then ran a polyretopo to smooth the model out and remove the dents where the meshes combined, which allowed me to export the mesh for my previs animation.

PROXY GEOMETRY

PREVIS

My previs of the first shot involved animating the character walking down a log, though the animation was basic the idea is there. I took my simple textured character into the scene and used mgear to rig the entire thing using mgear/Maya's default weights.

DETAILING

TEXTURING

WEIGHTS AND ANIMATION

FINAL OUTCOME

The below shot is my first sequence that I fully created using footage from project resources in college, a fully 3D modelled and textured character alongside compositing techniques learnt on NukeX through the time in my VFX course.

Although there are visible improvements to be made which I will be taking time to integrate, my two shots were created to completion by the deadline and it is only though audience feedback alongside personal reflection of my work that I have been able to recognise the area for change which will be considered on every project in future and will be used to update these shots.