Venus of Jale [Project Status: Production] [Alert: Mild Artistic Nudity]

Venus of Jale is animated short I’m making as a part of final exam in Digital Animation studies.

This project is inspired with artwork by Ljubodrag Jankovic Jale. Since middle of last century Jale creates remarkable paintings and sculptures. Central theme of Jale’s artwork is a figure of women. His figures aren’t particular persons, but a universal archaic form, a sublimation of women principle.


Idea isn’t to combine sculptures with realistic movements, like animators usually does (as in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, 2014), but to find a movement style which correspondent to a visual style of sculptures. Main effort will be in exploration of movement phases and style.

Through these project I’ll explore correlation between sculpture, animation and 3d graphic, using sculpture as a starting point in 3d animation phenomena. This project will be produced in form of 3d stereoscopic animation.

:eyebrowlift2: Any feedback and constructive criticism will be much appreciated.

Intro Scene Concept art


Bath Scene Concept Art


Men Scene Concept Art


End Scene Concept Art


Birdwoman Scene Concept Art


Thread moved at the request of the OP.

Couple of day ago, I had a fortune to meet with Jale. He let me to make a visit to his atelier and to take a photos of his sculptures. It was a surreal experience for me… I hold these beautiful sculptures in my hands.

No critique at this time. Impressive work so far.

You mentioned that you took photos. A 3D scanner might come handy to speed things up a bit but I’m sure you already thought of that, so I for one would like to read a bit about the process once you’re done.

Btw. “Mild artistic nudity” might work better as a warning in the title. The word “minor” also means underage so those who get bad translator results or are less fluent with english should know there are no pictures of nude children in this thread.

It’s quite obvious that English is not my native language. I appreciate suggestion about minor to mild, but I can’t change the thread title… I can only imagine how ridiculous internet looks like to anyone who is fluent with English. Sorry :o

Animation of this sculptures will be quite beyond ordinary character animation, so 3D scanner wont be suitable for a job. Currently, I don’t have a clue how I will produce digital characters which will support extreme deformations in animation phases, disappearing and appearing geometry, switching from masses to details, with soft body and cloth physics… and which will be light enough for desktop PC production. I’ll spend next couple of days in experiments, hopping for the best. When I menage to create some digital model, I would love to discuss about it and to see what can be done better.

You can change the title by editing the first post and click “go advanced” then you will have acces title editing.

Thank for the hint. :cool:

I just finished first test with a sculpture for 3th sequence of walking.

Currently I see some minor issues which would be nice to be solved.
For texture overlay I’m using Musgrave procedural texture attached to Object texture coordinate. It’s works perfect on static render, but it doesn’t move with the surface during animation.
I need to push out sleeves a little. I need geometry overlapping but not so much.

The biggest headache I have with Boolean modifier :(. I’m using it a lot to connect overlapping bodyparts into single mesh. Boolean produce a lot of glitches during animation. If verticles on join of 2 meshes aren’t perfectly align, Boolean will produce ugly joins. If any of polygons twisted during animation, Boolean will break. Two or three meshes overlapping in the same time and place will produce twisted polygons and Boolean will break. Even if everything is perfect, Boolean will produce a little different solutions during animation, which produce minor glitches, especially visible on lower poly count.
I see there is a new Data Transfer Modifier in Blender. Maybe some combination of Boolean, Remesh and Data Transfer for restoring UV Maps would produce better results…

Not perfect but still very nice results.

Not a surprise. Boolean operations and polygons mix like oil and water. Would need to know about the process and see the mesh structure (wireframe with solid faces) to comment on it though.

Might need to bake the textures to get them move with the mesh.

http://kekeljevic.com/share/test.gif

It looks like Boolean is stable with vertex positions, but every time have different solution for triangulation in area of meshes overlapping. During animation this result with glitches on joins.

http://kekeljevic.com/share/test2.gif

Remesh after Boolean produces stable result per single frame, but during animation every frame have different solution. This general noisiness can look great in animation, but the issue with Remesh is loosing UV Map data from original meshes. UV Map is necessary to use displacement, normal and cavity maps. I did some quick test with Data Transfer, but still didn’t figure it out how it works. Any hints?

Attachments


It looks like Date Transfer Modifier doesn’t dynamically updates, only updates on the button Generate Data Layers. Anyway, I cannot make UV Data Transfer work. Is there any other way to dynamically transfer maps data from one mesh to another?

I’m not sure if I completely understand the reason for using boolean and remesh on it. They both destroy mesh data and you lose things with them, like UV, and they’re not great for deformation. Might be better to have one mesh that deforms and deflect/hide overlapping geometry on that.

Could use shape keys to adjust the mesh while deforming. It’s also possible to have two meshes and have a form difference between them as a shape key (turning human head into a werewolf for example, 5:44 https://vimeo.com/16783367).

If nothing else works, could also explore what possibilities mesh cache might give to the process. Basically it can playback mesh sequence but there are options on there
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Modifiers/Modify/Mesh_Cache
https://vimeo.com/64965747

I made first tests with Intro scene. It’s a composite rendering without any postproduction. You are welcome to give some constructive criticism.




Some full resolution renders.

I’m loving this idea. Keep it up man!

I will, thanks.

We are here to share ideas and support each other in blending our dreams in digital matter. I would appreciate to have some feedback from my Blender family…