Los collages no aburren

The structure is united by control hierarchy and constraining of groups containing controllers. That way, every control can be keyed by the animator without any frozen values. Here one of the fk joints is selected. There is a joint parented to the bag in the same position, but they are not connected. It only exists as a joint point to attach the keychain

Each of those triangle can move the joint under, and each pair is parented to the “ribbons” in the middle. Scaling them made the smaller controls move and shrink or expand, making adjustment of the bag posible.

Now, on the leash.

The leash was modeled by Shaunna Proffit. It has independent structures at the top and the bottom for independence of the ends. IK handles and orient constraints are used on the leash hook to move its parts around. A ribbon + blendshape setup allows for control of the band's curvature.

I’m personally proud of the accidental mixed system of the hook. Though I didn’t intend it so, making a pole vector and parenting things a certain way made movement of the hook dynamic, while still connected to the leash geommetry.

The only unfortunate detail is that the leash is not as smooth in bend as it could be. It needed one ribbon joint to be more malleable, but time constraints forced us to move on and improvise with what we had.

Sadly, the geometry of the leash band had an extreme to which it could bend, and even with more joints it was impossible to not reveal the inside faces. A more advanced method of rigging was probably what this prop needed, but I’m not trained enough to know.

First, the roughs were made over two painstaking weeks, or three? But a 3D reference was needed first to get a grasp of the tracking without too much struggle.

With the roughs done, I progressed the cleanup and passed the coloring to Cat Bedell, asking them to only color certain frames and to leave me some to handle, since the distortion of Linx’s body features would need to be tracked and animated.

In pre-production, the goop surrounding Linx went from originally flat to very colored. Progression of my color key to Aja’s color key, which meant many colors to track. I had a keyframe rough of different saved in case we had time to animate them. Because they were many and the film’s upcoming needs looked compromising, I used different layers to animate colors one by one, in order of bottom to top. Going by every group of dots made things flow much faster.

I separated the goop by front and back layers, as the forms shift and rotate  behind Linx and then exist in front of him. I had to be very careful selecting and dividing what I had animated.

With all done, I had to arrange and render separate layers as frame sequences. I brougth them all together in after effects, grouped the front and back together and made the major goop shapes the mask.