New (and final) Characters, I swear

Ok, so those of you who follow our facebook page may have seen these guys already, but there was very little information other than the pictures there. so without further ado...

As you can see, there are three characters in the above picture. Meat, Spud and Grimy Grimm(wald). Whilst they are not major characters, we've sort of fallen in love with them and the time may come for them to have a movie on their own.

And their blurb, straight from the Gruffleglenn Bi-Decade-ly Census:

Meat
The younger brother of Spud. He's a bit clumsy, but what he lacks in grace can easily be made up for by his stupidity. He works for the Gruffleglenn City Watch, and is responsible for a great many cock-ups on thier part. Owns a pet cockatrice which he feeds scraps taken from other peoples dinner tables.


Spud
Is a thug. He stands over 2 metres tall. Possibly has mixed giant heritage. He and his brother Meat both work for the Gruffleglenn City Watch where their main responsibilities are drinking, gambling and beating people up. Some have remarked on his features bearing a similarity to Gruff, never to his face though.


Grimy Grimm (Grimwald)
Though officially listed as an undertaker in the Gruffleglenn Bi-Decade-ly Census, he does not maintain a shopfront, nor has he for the past thirty censi. In fact he is remarkably difficult to find. It is said that one does not find Grimy Grimm, Grimy Grimm finds one.

And some concept art and an accidental render that turned out pretty cool (the silhouette).

We were rather happy with the concept art for Grimy Grimm, and I think that the models similarity reflects that. The main differences being a slightly bigger head and a Sporran, rather than a pouch.

The concept of the thug we found rather cool, but ultimately too disgusting. We wanted the thugs to be a bit silly, not to upstage the main villain Gruff McDuff.

So, if we take this slightly older image (below) and add it to the newer one (the first image from the post) we come up with a grand total of 8 characters. Namely: Alky Al, Pidgy, Squidly, Laurence, Gruff, Meat, Spud and Grimy Grim(wald).

When we add to this the amount of different sets: Als Laboratory/Room, the Stables, the Dirty Carpets Inn and the city of Gruffleglenn (which actually is rather massively humongous) we end up with something extremely epic.

Our goal at the start was 1 character, 1 set, no fancy FX or flowing cloth, 2-3 minutes in length. Ummmmm. I guess we're just suckers for punishment.

Anyway, more on the sets next time.

Gruff texturing WIP

Here is the current texturing/shading progress on the barkeep Gruff. As you can see there is a couple of issues with texture seams, particularly around the arms/shoulders. Should be fixed very soon. Still to add, spec/reflection maps for the skin, scars, tattoos and maybe some stitching and other small details.

The main concern right now is whether to keep the texturing on the characters fairly simple in order to help pull them off the background, or use other tricks to achieve the same affect whilst not having too much difference between characters and sets.

Textured in 3D-Coat and Photoshop, rendered in Renderman with a simple 3 point light setup. A lot of the shaders are using procedural bump maps which I quite like the look of too.

Test Animation - Apple Dumplings

An animation test featuring the alchemist asking Gruff about apple dumplings. The animation created using the calimari rig of the character. As yet we do not have a facial rig animation ready The sound is from Disneys Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.