BLOWING STUFF UP!

The latest episode of How To Do Everything With Garrick And Marvin is up on Dreamworks TV.  "How To Kiss" this episode I wanted to actually try and blow up the machine that malfunctions.  The Kissing Machine itself is a bizarre invention, mostly designed to punish the user.

Black powder was what I used to make the big flash, It was just in an open pile not enclosed in any way.  I protected the camera with a sheet of plexiglass to deflect and hot embers from the camera lens.   Shooting at a frame rate of 60 FPS then slowing it down to quarter speed in post still wasn't quite slow enough to capture the full essence of the blast.

We had some B-Roll recording for the explosion, definitely the fun part of doing animation.

ASTRO SLOTH SCULPT!

The Astro-Sloth sculpture was great fun, if you like sculpting cloth wrinkles which I do.  Now that I'm putting together this post I realized that I did not do much documentation I wish I had!  Promise I will do a wrinkle sculpting how to in the next month.  The pic above was sculpting the back detail, the problem being how to get to the underneath as well as the back with out ruining the front.  Foam padding is a great thing to lay the sculpt on, I was using a fluffy towel, fluffy-ish anyway.

The head was sculpted separately after I baked the body.  Sometimes it's freeing to do parts individually.  The ring around his neck is a 2" diameter  PVC pipe breaking up the flow of the sculpt by having sharp machined piece to contrast the soft wrinkles and fur texture.

People seem to be liking the Astro-Sloth maybe there is a vinyl toy of this guy in the future.

WORST CHARACTER DESIGN!

This particular character was just too horrible to ignore.  Usually I try not just hate a design outright, I think it's more productive to talk about technique, philosophy of design etc.  However The Skinny Cow character is an assault on the eyes and it was right in front of me.

 

This might be an titillating character for the furry crowd, but I don't believe the average ice cream eating public wants a mutant human woman cow peddling dairy treats.  This fits in with an earlier post My Biggest Character Design Pet Peeve from January.   My last character design problem was Pixar's animated short Lava.   The man volcano is a rocky volcano with a face, created from the foliage and stone.  The female volcano is a tall thin human looking volcano with long hair and feminine features, a really bad design that is hard to find an image on the internet, no surprise. Maybe at some point I'll list my top 5 most hated character designs.

For Charlie