Rolling Road
A low cost web commercial
Loft music studio commercial is another Live Music Animation I did. This one is different from Duel. Duel is a dream that has all the support from studio, but this ads is a freelancer work with limited time and cost. Therefore, I have to support myself on this one by doing Character and Env Design, Character and Prop Modeling, Character and Related Props Rigging and Constrain, Animation (which is my focusing), and Basic Rendering. (www.loftmusicstudio.net)
ENV Modeling
The basic concept of this ads is On the Road + Rock and Roll, I called Rolling Road when I did this. American Muscle car is a cool idea, I take 70s Chevy Impala as a big reference for the vehicle park in my environment. Another cool staff is Amp, if you are the fan into Old School Rock, you may know Valco Supro. I take that as an icon, and re-generate a Guitar Amp follow the visual element of Valco Supro. By viewing environment, you will find the story might happening in 1970 to 1980.
Characters Modeling & Rigging
Another Great thing to show is original characters. I take this process as creating a minimal art. By looking the models, you will find they have individual design, but they belong to same world. Actually all those are created from same basic model. Because they are simply modeled and cleverly rigged, when I move it to animation process, it works so smooth without any crash or stuck. It's just suitable for the size of project, time and cost.
Props
Drum kits are always interact with Drummer. To set the pedal (even there's only 10 frame, but I still use a blend-shape control to make pedal structure work instead of cheating). The structure is, animator animates pedal, then the spring will automatically be stretched, and axle will automatically rotate which drives bass drum hammer knock the bass drum. Technically, The basic idea is f(x), x means the angle of pedal, f(x) is the math strategy to get pedal, spring, foot and hammer work correctly with x being changed by animator. Since I am familiar with Grasshopper, which is a Visual Programming Language system, designing the constrain structure in Node Editor (another V.P.L system in MAYA) is also easy for me.
String rig is another thing that will make animation convincing. All the string for Rolling Road actually is Joint Rigged (as well as for Duel). Every string has 4 controls, which is starting point control, string bending control, picking control and ending point control.
