The “Lunatics!” project is a free-culture / open-movie series about the first settlers on the Moon, and we are now looking for a character rigging expert to apply, emulate, and/or adapt rigs for our characters – probably based on the Blender Cookie “Flexi-Rig”. I’m posting here in the volunteer forum, because this is not a pay-up-front opportunity, although of course, all contributors will be included if our creator-endorsed business model succeeds in earning profits.
The project has been moving slowly towards completion of our pilot episode, “No Children in Space”, following a Kickstarter which supported character concept design and modelsheets, and a Summer project in 2012 which created assets for a “teaser” demo we published in 2013. We have produced the entire soundtrack for the pilot and the 2nd episode, “Earth” (also adapted as a audio play, which is on our website at http://lunatics.tv/Episodes/S1E02/Audiodrama/ , released Nov 20, 2013).
For more detail on the overall project, including objectives, story, and so on, I encourage you to read the production log: http://lunatics.tv/Plone/news
The project now also features excellent rigged mechanical models by principal mech modeler, Chris Kuhn; and character models by principal character modeler Bela Szabo. We have just begun working with Sathish Kumar on the set-modeling, after a cleanup of project assets needed to maintain the linking system, and we’ve recently been joined by Keneisha Perry for wardrobe and additional character modeling. Our previous rigger has found himself overwhelmed by school and work commitments, and has had to bow out, quite understandably – but it leaves a hole in our team.
At the beginning of this year, I decided to push forward on the NPR style revision for the series, which is somewhat anime-inspired, and has been very well-received. The attached image is one of the renders I made for the project this Spring as an illustration.
I want to move on to doing similar demonstrations with characters on sets, and then hopefully to principal animation starting this Summer, but this is going to require that we resolve our character rigging issues. Now, both Bela Szabo and Keneisha Perry have some knowledge of character rigging and Rigify, and I am willing to learn, but they already have a pretty big job on character modeling for the project, and I would really like to find someone who understands rigging very well, as this is an important part of making the animation look good.
Early this year, I decided that a good strategy for the rigging would be to adapt the Blender Cookie “Flexi-Rig” to our project. This would have several clear advantages:
- A common rig for all characters is obviously a good idea to simplify learning animation on our project and to allow actions to be copied from one character to another.
- Using the Flexi-Rig means that anyone who has taken the Blender Cookie “Blender Animation Toolkit” course would already know how to animate our characters
- Given the experts designing it (Nathan Vegdahl and Beorn Leonard, both of Sintel fame), it’s likely to be a very good general-purpose character rig, which is exactly what we need on a long-running project.
- The adaptability of the rig (with separate control and deformation layers) should allow it to be applied to a wide variety of characters with relative ease
It is not clear to me at this point whether the right thing is to actually use the Flexi-Rig itself, or merely to emulate it. Our previous rigging expert had proposed emulating it, based on Rigify. However, I’m open to either approach.
The existing character models already have facial shape keys, based on the Sintel shape key system. I’m hoping this isn’t too far from what is used with Flexi-Rig, given that they were designed by the same people.
Why should you contribute?
- Idealism: We’re trying to create a niche for commercially-sustainable free-culture productions. Like any project, this still requires an initial investment or contribution, in our case, of time.
- Glory: Since our project will be freely distributed online through streaming and download sites, it should be highly visible, as will be anyone in the cast or crew list.
- Your Demo Reel: A free-license means you can use any of your work for your own demonstrations, even when that means copying other people’s work as well (which of course is important for rigging).
- Camaraderie: We have some great people who you’ll be working with on the modeling team: Chris Kuhn (mech), Bela Szabo (characters), Sathish Kumar (sets), Keneisha Perry (Wardrobe).
- Art: Lunatics! is a story-first project – a witty and optimistic hard-SF look at the human future and the character of pioneers. It’s about the space advocacy movement as it exists today, and what it might evolve into. Rosalyn Hunter is a very sharp writer with a keen eye for character and a mountain of experience and scientific knowledge to back it up. Director Terry Hancock (that’s me!) has been participating in or following decades of space tech, astronomy, and engineering plus training in film and cinematography.
- A Piece of the Action: Lastly, you could do it for the money. It’s probably a long shot that we’ll make any money to write home about, but creator-endorsed have worked before, and we’ve thought hard about how to position this. As a series, funding will be based on a cyclic model – but nothing really gets started until we have a pilot episode. With the “Prolog” as an animated short, though, we can start showing in festivals and the like to promote it (and we might have another successful crowd-funding round after that.
I can tell you that I personally am doing it for ALL of these reasons.
Sorry for any confusion!