I was listening to this month’s 11 Second Club sound bite and got inspired to play with Josh Burton’s Squirrel Rig.  I knew I wouldn’t have the time to actually animate 11 seconds of this character before the month’s end deadline, but it was fun to take a break from other things to put him into a few poses.

Here’s a quickly modeled squirrel idea I got while eating eating my breakfast yesterday.  Real simple, but the potential for mischief is there, no?  Maybe I will come back and finish him after I am done with Mr. Happinstance’s UV map and textures.

I Used a combination of cylindrical and planar projection maps so far.  The hands need to be redone, however.  I think I relaxed the UVs to much after separating the UVs in a weird way only to have to sew them back together.  It got a bit warped.  Will fix and move onto the head.

Well, it’s been an hour here and an hour there but this model is ready for UV mapping.  All-in-all, taking into consideration having to start and stop as each opportunity presented itself to work on the project, this took about 16 hours.  That’s a rough estimate, but since it’s unfortunately not a full-time project and I usually had to steal the time away from other actvivities like sleep and recouperating from a long day taking care of the kids, 16 hours is a pretty good guess.

Ultimately, I would love to cut that time in half, and include time for UV mapping.  Since the model only topped out at just over 4,000 tris, that’s not unreasonable I think.  We’ll see.

I had so much fun, I might do another character next.  I have approached an animator/storyboard artist friend of mine, José Pou to model one of his female characters, which you can find at his blog, MUGGEFUG!

Just when I got settled back into the on-going “Pilot/Heavy Fighter” modeling project that started with the modeling of the “Pilot Helmet”, I get word that a local company is looking for character modelers.  I enjoy working on my 3D projects and I certainly enjoy working with Maya, but a job is a job and I want a job again working in 3D.

So, that means the “Pilot/Heavy Fighter” modeling project gets moved to the back-burner once again in favor of potential employment.

The Modeling of  “Mr. Happinstance”
(A working title)

The good news is, this project has already been started and needs a quick turn-around.  Below is a screen capture of my perspective view in Maya of the half-model so far.  The design is of a character that artist,  Ryan Reid drew that he and myself had came up with for an independent film that got unfortunately shelved (but who knows, that may all change after this project).  This partially cleaned up drawing, shown above, is the only image I kept.

There are some modeling corrections to be made for sure and I have been getting some very helpful critiques from Alistair Murphy, a seasoned 2D/3D illustrator currently working at Fuel Industries.  I’ve known Alistair since our early days of working at PIP Animation, years before they expanded into full animation production.

With any luck, I will have modeling finished on Mr. Hap this weekend, which is a long weekend here in Canada, and be ready to begin setting up the UVs next week.