Flexible Foam and Creatures in the Third Dimension

One thing I always wanted to do with the creature drawings was to try and bring them from their flat, 2-D world into our fully realized 3-D one. Naturally, not every creature lends itself to 3-D, but some would make for quite interesting models.

While I was still in school I was taking a class on flexible molds; mainly dealing with rubber, silicone, and things of that nature. I figured it was the perfect chance to try and make some casts of one of the kids creatures, so I went about doing it!

 

The creature I chose was the funny little orange guy from one of the groups ‘desert’ creatures. He had a nice thick shape and wouldn’t fall over if I tried to translate him into the third dimension, and besides, he was funny! Here you can see the finished product, made from orange dyed flexible foam (almost like a Nerf material), with some eyes and a mouth that I drew on myself.

But how did I get to that point?

At first, I made a model of the creature from plasticina. The oil based clay doesn’t dry out in air, and generally wont stick to anything in the mold either, so it’s perfect for this kind of thing. From there I had to find a “parting line” for the mold, which is usually down the center of an object, as it is here (roughly). Then, I had to pick a place to pour my casting material into, one which wouldn’t be very obvious on the final piece. In this case, there’s a small spout under his belly. After all of that I painted on various layers of rubber, building up the shape you can see here, which ultimately becomes the rubber mold you would cast into.

Once all of that dries, you need a 2nd mold out of a harder material to carry the softer mold inside and keep it from moving while the cast dries. For this we use plaster jacket that goes around the rubber. You can see the large shell I built up along the seam, with little locking keys so the pieces fit snugly into one another, and holes drilled through to bolt the entire mold together tightly right before you pour something in.

After the plaster dried, I had to pry it apart, open the rubber mold, and finally take the plasticina prototype out of it. Put all the pieces back together and you end up with this again, with the hole in the center there ready to pour. Remember at this point the creature is upside-down, and the pour spout will be on his underbelly. Due to gravity and air pressure you have to be careful not to have parts of the mold be above the pourspout, or they’ll never fill due to air blockage. You can make tiny airholes at these points so that air can escape and the casting material can fill them in, but theres still a chance it may settle lower into the mold than it’s supposed to. I had this problem slightly with the creatures stubby feet.

Anyhow, I cast using the flexible foam, which you mix and then have to immediately pour into the mold as it expands many times its original size. So a very small drop of foam will fill a huge area of the mold. I placed a brick over the pour spout to try and contain the foam and ensure it filled all the cavities, but as you can tell from the mold itself, some of it exploded out through any crack or crevasse it could squeeze itself through! After all is said and done, you simple unbolt the plaster jacket, pry open the rubber mold, and pop out you casting! What could be easier, right?

Time to Animate

People had asked me what I used to animate the drawings, so I thought I’d do a brief run-down of my process.

 

At first I scanned all 460 drawings, which as you can guess takes a while. Depending on the colors used and how timid the artist was drawing it, the resulting image would sometimes be less than ideal. Lighter colors like yellow and pink are especially problematic, but I could usually get the drawings look decent. At first I would end up with something like this…

And get it looking more like this…

From here I “cut them out” in Adobe Photoshop so that the only thing Im working with is a nicely trimmed creature on a transparent background. From there, we move into Adobe After Effects.

 

After Effects is a program most people use for motion graphics and whatnot, but you can also do snazzy animations and special effects with it. Once I import all my cut out creatures and scenery I can begin. Normally you can move images over an x and y axis (up and down, left and right), and with a button press, you can go into the Z plane. This is how everything looks 3-D, with a virtual camera flying through a virtual space. In the image up there you can see how I set up all the objects in their proper spots and flew the camera through the scene, with things popping into view as needed. The view on the right is what the camera see, but the view on the left shows you all the elements lined up. You can see the bushes in the front there that block you view as the scene begins, and those two little rectangles on the bigger rectangle in the far back there are those two creatures in the tree that get eaten later on.

The camera itself has a bunch of controls that can do things like a “real camera”, and here you can see I have a really low F-Stop and Depth of Field enabled which will allow for the extremely shallow focus and blur that you can see in the animation.

But the main thing I used to actually make the creatures move is called the Puppet Tool. The Puppet Tool is now in both the newer versions of Photoshop as well as After Effects, and when you activate it, it breaks any image down into a series of polygons, like so.

It also works by the placing of “pins.” Here you can see the creature broken into polygons, and the pins Ive placed at his hips, shoulders, and feet. You can up the triangle count to get a smoother bend, but usually it isn’t necessary in something like this. Each pin adds a reference point that the others will bend around. You can use other tools like a stiffener if you don’t want to things to move, but because I wanted to extreme rubberyness I just tried to place minimal pins and let them do their thing.

By pulling a pin, you can see how the foot stretches out, but also how the head moves, as well as the rest of the body besides the area surrounding a pin. Again, this is something I want to give it those charming silly movements.

Look at him go! But that’s more or less “all there is to it.” Once I had my music selected, I went through and marked the timecodes on any heavy or interesting beat, and made sure to animate each little scene within those strict frame allowances. Once I was done with that, I just plopped them all down in a timeline, and they already synced correctly to the music because I had specifically designed them to!

Here is a basic tutorial from the handy guys at VideoCopilot if you wanted to try 3-D layers in After effects yourself, so give it a look if you’re interesting in getting into some basic After Effectsing. Good Luck and have fun animating!

http://www.videocopilot.net/basic/tutorials/07.3d/