Week 1

To begin thinking of a project I started with thinking of themes that I liked and would be simple enough to pull off – in previous projects I have given myself too much scope and this leads to me trying to create a more interesting project, however the work itself suffers as I give myself too many challenges to complete by the deadline. I decided that I quite liked the Wild West theme and it is fairly easy to dissect – for example referencing popular elements that are found in Wild West themes such as gunslinging, certain camera shots, environment type, background objects (eg; cacti, tumbleweed, cattle) is fairly easy to replicate. However I haven’t seen too many Wild Western inspired short animated films that are light-hearted, so I thought that even though it is a more well-known and possibly more played-out theme, that I could create something fairly unique whilst not having the difficulties of establishing things to the audience, as most audiences will already be acquainted with the tropes that take place in Wild-Western media.

Week 2

To begin the draft for my storyboard, I initially had the idea of a man riding into a town, eventually coming across the sheriff, and the main interesting part of the story would be their duel. However, this didn’t seem very interesting to me and has very much already been done before a million times. I thought about changing the characters to make the story a bit more interesting, and instead decided to make it a living cactus that a cowboy would be duelling. Later, I continued to develop this and changed the environment at the suggestion of outside feedback to more of a wild-west plains design, instead of giving myself the extra work of modelling a whole town. During my research of different Western media, I came across “Rango”, a film with a Western theme that follows the story of a chameleon who becomes embroiled in a towns’ problem of a lack of water, the water being limited by the mayor. I thought that I could also use water as the conflict point in my story – two characters both need water and race each other to a limited supply of water (one of the characters being a cactus still and the other being a cowboy). Eventually they both reach the water after tripping each other up/preventing each other from getting to the water first, only to knock it over/find the water butt empty. If I have time I might make it begin raining after, showing that their battle was pointless, or maybe just have them look at each other and narrow their eyes, ready to duel each other.

Week 3

I began the process of modelling the cowboy, first I tried using a sculpt in ZBrush and retopologising it but I thought that this way would not be ideal as I have not got that much experience making good topology for animation.

Therefore I started again, using a base mesh to begin from and tweaking him inside of ZBrush and Maya, sending him back and forth until I got something close to what I wanted. I didn’t want him to be too complex, but have some visual interest, so I began making him a sort of Ace of Spades theme, with his backstory for the project that he had been kicked out of the nearest town for cheating at cards, and so he was looking for a water source after wandering the plains.

Adding props to him helped to develop him into a bit more of a unique looking character instead of a generic cowboy. I modelled a belt initially, to allow for more areas to include his “Spades” motif. After this, I decided to model gun as well as a water canteen that he could have attached to the belt, and a holster to hold the gun. I wanted the model to be fairly low poly for this project so I kept this in mind whilst modelling the props as well.

Week 4

I started modelling the cactus, first trying to be efficient by morphing my cowboy character into a cactus. However this looked pretty creepy and I quickly realised the cactus would not look normal with a morphed human face, and instead would be better to go entirely simplified. This modelling process was a lot simpler than for the cowboy as the cactus was just a simple cylinder with arms basically. I found a tutorial for simple stylized eye rigs after realising that a living cactus with human eyes looks very wrong and creepy. Instead, having black rectangles for eyes felt a lot more natural, and allowed for the cactus to not fall into uncanny valley.

I found a rig tutorial online for the eyes and rigged them to be able to deform into different shapes using set driven keys – for example he has blink, anger, sad, joy, water, spades, etc shapes for his eyes that can be animated quickly. I set this up using Set Driven Keys, using the Attribute editor and the connection editor to link the controls with the different shaped eye geometry.

Week 5

During this week I started working with a collaborator to create a rocky landscape. I also began modelling and texturing environmental props. Deciding that the characters would be wandering the desert looking for water made me think that a grand canyon type environment would be visually interesting and also funnel both characters towards each other, making the story more logical. I knew that I would need multiple scenes – one scene to get the characters interested in the water source, and then one scene of the water source itself. The first scene was intended to be a very open space that had a sign that motivates the characters to find the water source, heading down the narrower passage.

I also worked with my collaborator on the second scene, deciding that the space would be mostly open with the water source right in the middle, obviously as the main objective of both characters.

Week 6

I began the rigging process for both characters. I used Advanced Skeleton 5 for the cowboy character as I wanted the rig to be done more quickly, though I spent time to adjust the joint positioning and spent a lot more time after painting the weights so that the rig would deform correctly. For the cactus, I first attempted to rig him using the default Advanced Skeleton setup with some joints deleted, but realised this didn’t work and instead decided to manually rig him.

During this week I also textured several props for my project in Substance Painter, using stencils and smart materials mostly.

Week 7

I finalised the rigging process and textured both the main characters using Substance Painter. During this time I was able to make the cowboy character more visually interesting by making him have a set colour scheme as well as make his outfit more appealing by adding spade designs on his clothing. I used semi realistic texturing for the cactus as I could not think of a midway point between flat colour and ultra realistic textures – flat colour was too simple and boring but ultra realistic would look strange next to the stylised cowboy man.

Week 8

I began animating on this week. To begin with, I divided the scenes into the two different environments I would be using, and started playing with camera positioning and movements. I used two large cubes as placeholders and tweaked the cameras until it looked reasonably good.

After this I began working on the first character animation scenes of my project, with multiple establishing shots of the cowboy. I rendered these on the off times whilst I slept.

Week 9

I continued animating on this week. Animating the second half involved making decisions on how the cactus moved as well as how the overall story would resolve. I had less time than I thought and so had to cut some corners in my animation unfortunately, but I managed to get what I wanted done.

For this project I also wanted to add water, with the barrel of water spilling at the end of the animation. This would be quite experimental as I have not created water yet. I had looked at some particle systems before that can be used to create water such as RealFlow, Houdini, and BiFrost as well as Blender, but all of my attempts at following tutorials were met with failure – most of the time resulting in crashes, as my computer hardware I think is too outdated to process complex simulations.

Week 10

I began the post-processing in premiere pro, finding appropriate sound effects for the project that I thought fitted the theme. Similarly to my other project, this project has more of a light hearted comedic theme, so I chose sound effects that would contribute to this feeling. I cut some areas of the project out as they didn’t fit or could be streamlined more for the project to be more simplified.