Figure 1. Happy Easter Short Film.

Happy Easter: Short Film

Overview

Happy Easter, Figure 1, is a short film that I created as a part of a team of four for an animation course. The short film follows the Easter Bunny on their annual day trip to hide eggs, receiving an unexpected visitor in the form of a chick that hatches in their basket. While I occupied many roles throughout the project, the most prominent was my role as the character designer. For further information about other aspects of production please visit the project's dedicated website for more details.

Design

Character Moodboard for Easter Bunny Used to Guide Design
Figure 2. Character moodboard for Easter Bunny with images of features to guide the character design.

The design of the characters began collectively in a group ideation session about the art direction of the film which resulted in characters' mood boards such as Figure 2. The design needed to be simple enough to adhere to a relatively low-polygon aesthetic while being able to retain a high degree of emotiveness that could be communicated without dialogue. With this in mind, I then synthesized the different aspects of the mood board that we discussed into the initial character sheets such as Figure 3.

Character Design Sheet showing character in T-pose for modeling and expression poses.
Figure 3. Character design sheet for the Easter Bunny showing character in T-pose for modeling, and variety of poses to convey potential expressions of character.

Using Autodesk's Maya, I modelled the characters according to the character sheet (Figure 4), rigged (Figure 5), and UV unwrapped (Figure 6) to create a diffuse map for the characters. Further texture details, such as displacement maps for the appearance of fur, were created in Blender where the film was eventually rendered.

Model of Easter Bunny in Maya viewport compared to the T-pose of character sheet.
Figure 4. Easter Bunny character model in T-pose in Maya viewport compared to the character design sheet.
Rigging of the Chick character with joint stucture, hierarchy in the outliner, and skinned and posed.
Figure 5. Chick character model's rig with outlined hierarchy, joint structure, and skinned pose.
Diffuse texture map of Easter Bunny with UV unwrapped overlay.
Figure 6. Easter Bunny's diffuse texture map with overlay of model's UV unwrap.

Challenges Rigging and Weight Painting

The most challenging portion of the character creation process was the weight painting portion of rigging the character. My unfamiliarity with the process of weight painting for rigging led to me being very surprised by the distortions that the rig had on the model, as seen in Figure 7. Through trial and error, I was slowly able to scale and adjust the influence of the joints of the rig on the model so that it would be suitable for all the angles in the film such as in Figure 8. If I were allowed to redo this project, I would go back and research more of the theory behind weight painting so that the result is more consistent.

Easter Bunny model with distortion around the hip joint due to weighting issues.
Figure 7. Easter Bunny's skinned model with distortion around hip joint while bending forward due to weighting issues.
Shot from short film of Easter bunny bending down to bet the chick, angle that obscures weighting issues.
Figure 8. Shot of the Easter Bunny bending down to pet the Chick. The angle of the shot obscures the weighting issue seen in Figure 7.

Reflection

For me, this project was very successful. This project was my first opportunity to apply my theoretical understanding of the 3D animation workflow and experience dealing with some of the challenges inherent to the process that I would have otherwise would have not encountered without it.

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