Rigging Doodles 4

Today's break doodles 

Toad Patrol character (c) it's owner which is not me

Rigging Doodles3

More doodling during my rigging breaks. 

Demon Rig Process

I have been getting a surprising amount of rigging experience lately. Some how I've manage to almost rig my whole senior film by myself. All that is left is my little demon guy (who is one of the main characters). I've spent the past week adding more flexibility to his face and now I'm working on his body rig (with some very special help from abAutoRig). Right now I'm in the process of painting his weights (see here for an explanation of what that is and my feelings about it) Wish me luck! 

testing various poses his face can achieve

adding lots and lots of stretching capabilities....with some frightening results...

painting weights so that the skin moves properly when the animator animates it. 

Rigging Break Doodles 2

Yesterday's break doodles. Just a bunch of nonsense.

Rigging Doodle Breaks

I've been working on some rigging in Maya for my 3D senior animation film and to keep myself sane, I took a couple of doodle breaks. Here are the results. 

Space Kids Sketches

edit: you can look at the sketches a bit closer on my deviantart page 

I've been working on a lot of different story ideas this summer and this is one of my newer ones that has quickly gained a lot of favor with me. I love sci-fi and I've always wanted to do my own sci-fi series that focuses more on the children of a starship than the adults. That's kind of what I have going here. The main character is a young alien girl who is new to the corporate starship. The starship belongs to a very large energy corporation that requires some of it's industrial processes to be done in deep space (partially to expel the waste product into deep space away from inhabited planets and partially because the refinement process needs to be done in zero gravity). On top of it's industrial production, the ship also takes on other company contracts (so they might pick up something for another corporation if they are on the right side of space). 

The main story doesn't focus on the ship. It focuses on a few of the children on the ship and their every day lives as a part of this moving lab. The new alien girl eventually befriends the human girl that I have also sketched here. While the alien girl is trying to be a bit more conformist and safe, the human girl is a wild child who wants to stand out. The main conflict with the alien girl lies in the fact that she is a part of a race that has been recently known to commit acts of terrorism. So her mom wants her to fit in with the other children and be seen as unthreatening, while some of the other children are a bit frightened or angry at her for what a few of her people have done. 

It's all very much a work in process, I haven't quite nailed things down yet, but I'm really excited about some of the ideas I've been coming up with. Hopefully there is a future for these characters, so far they've been a blast to work with. 

all characters (c) Debbie Scheller 2013

The Trio

These are three characters from a story I'm currently developing. It's sort of Wizard of Oz-esk. The toad was actually a prince that was turned into a toad by a witch at a particularly boring party. He's trying to find the witch to be turned back into a prince, or at least a frog (which is way more kiss worthy than a toad). Following him are his two companions: a fish that wants her memory restored and a large cat who wants thumbs so that he can at last fulfill his dream of playing the violin.