The director of the short film White Wednesday, Rebecca Lyons Wright, wanted the pigeon to look like a clay pigeon as opposed to it being a real pigeon. She wanted the style of the character to be quite cartoon like to fit with the rest of the short film's style. She wanted the character to look unrealistic and she wanted the character to look like he would belong in children's television program.
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| Pigeon Concept Sheet 01 |
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| Pigeon Concept Sheet 02 |
The second concept sheet on the right was created to illustrate how the the pigeon might look like in a more realistic approach. I mostly looked at real images of birds as well as the movie Valiant for other reference as I didn't want the pigeon to look too realistic.
The concept sketches that I created for the short film White Wednesday, was really interesting and fun to work on. One of the mistakes that I have done with regrades to the concept sketches was that I focused too much on creating the head that I did not spend time on creating a body but the heads do look pretty awesome.
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| Rebecca Lyons Wright |
When I started modelling the character I looked at different images as well as video clips of birds as reference but mostly pigeons in particular. I looked at each part of their body, to see how they move around and what they look like; even images of their anatomy really helped me to understand how I should approach the model. I had to think about how everything would work once it came to animating him to avoid things like stretching. I created the hi poly 3D model within Pixologic's 3D sculpting program ZBrush, through using the reference together with the concept art. Getting the basic form of the body was fairly easy but getting down to the very detail was the fun part. ZBrush makes it so much easier, faster and much more fun to sculpt. The only draw back was that I needed to go through the process of retopologizing, but you create a much better and effective model in the end. I created the textures through using the polypaint function within ZBrush which makes texturing more accurate and you are not creating many obvious seams in your textures. Polypaint makes texturing faster, especially with the unwrapping tools in ZBrush.
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| Pigeon Breakdown Shots |
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| Hi-Poly Pigeon |
The image on the right, Hi-Poly Pigeon, illustrates three render taken to show different angles of the pigeon character once the character has been fully modelled and textured. At this stage the character looks great but because he is hi poly we wouldn't have been able to use him for animation purposes. He has too many polygons this would cause problems; so therefore we needed to reduce to poly count by making him a low poly character. through the process of retopologizing. Below are images that shows what the low poly model looks like compared to the hi poly model.
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| Low-Poly Pigeon |
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| Low-Poly Pigeon Wire frame |
The image on the left Low-Poly Pigeon Wire frame, is an image that shows three different renders that I have created of the pigeon in order to illustrates the pigeon character's polygons that he has been made out of in his low-poly form.
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| Low-Poly Pigeon, Blend Shapes |
I then created the blend shapes which allows the character to blink, smile and create different facial expressions. This adds life to his face and brings across his emotions during animation. I used Pixologic's 3D sculpting program ZBrush to create these. Creating them was fun and I would have loved to create more; you can never have enough and they create a better animation.
The pigeon character was rigged by Matthew Tolcher. The rig allows the 3D model of the character to be animated. The video above is a short animation of the pigeon flying. The video is showing a breakdown of the rig as well as steps that he has gone through to achieve the final shot that is used within the short film.
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