Ashley Aerostar Personal Project

[MasterJedi2014]

After 14 months of procrastinating, Ashley's brother is no longer just a name and finally has a model. His name is Daniel Christopher Aerostar.



The pose for this scene is based on a pose from one of the photos that was taken for use in my high school graduation party invite cards.

Because the Daniel Aerostar character is supposed to literally be me, I tried to make the character look like me. That being said, I doubt I succeeded at 100% accurately capturing my face. Which is fine, I knew I wasn't likely going to get it completely right. I also don't care that the face isn't completely accurate because I have been working on it off and on for the last 14 months and just wanted to to get it done at this point.

The glasses were modeled in Blender, and are very similar to the glasses I am currently wearing. However, my lenses aren't tinted like the ones in this image are. The lenses are rendering as if they are tinted no matter what I do, so I am just going to accept that the Daniel character wears glasses with tinted lenses.

Here is Daniel next to his sister Ashley.


The more astute might notice that it looks like Ashley is leaning farther forward than Daniel is in this image, and they'd be right. Ashley is 179.25 cm (5’10.6”) tall, and I am 174.9425 cm (5’8.875”) tall, so Ashley has to lean farther forward than the Daniel character does.

[MasterJedi2014]

It's been a while since I posted here, hasn't it? Well I have returned! I have an update on my project that is both large and small in importance. I recently made my first test animation for Ashley, figuring that with the end goal of the project being an animated video I needed to get some experience actually animating the characters at some point. I have posted the video to YouTube, will be attaching the MP4 version of the video to this post, and will be posting the vastly inferior GIF version I had to make to post this to Deviant Art right here:

AshleyV5_22yr_Casual1_Intro Scene_Anim Test V3.mp4

(399.22 KiB) Downloaded 203 times

Anyway, moving on to info on this animation. This is revision three of my animation test for Ashley. I decided to animate this at 30 FPS to cut down on render times. Even on a friend's high end PC this still took about two hours to render per revision, and it took about seven hours to render on my computer that these days would probably be considered a low end PC. I think this animation looks good considering the fact that I have never before tried animating (different from posing) an organic character model, especially one as complex as this. I have animated mechanical characters in the past, but they were much simpler in almost every regard in comparison to Ashley's model. It has also been something like four or five years since I animated those mechanical characters. Also, I have technically animated organic characters before, but they were simple Minecraft character models, and weren't much different functionally from the mechanical models I have animated.

I know that there are still some issues with this animation, and I am fine with that. The elbow is was very buggy in the previous revision and is still a bit buggy in this one, but most of the issues from the previous revision seem to be fixed now. For this revision, I also tried to make Ashley's eyebrows ever so slightly (as in, unnoticeable unless you're looking for it) twitch when she blinks, just like I do when I blink. However, after seeing the rendered result, I don't think I can make that kind of motion look great at 30 FPS. That and I overdid the motion on it. I don't think it looks terrible at 30 FPS, but I think it would look better at 60 FPS.
This was always meant to be a test animation, something to make mistakes with and to get me started on learning how to animate my character models. I just happen to think it is also good enough to post.

Any thoughts, suggestions, or constructive criticism is welcome, and thank you for your time. Also, if anyone knows a good way of making high quality GIFs from video files, please let me know. I had to convert the video file into a GIF to post this to my Deviant Art account because the video is shorter than ten seconds, and GIPHY's video to GIF conversion process brought the framerate down from 30 to something like 10-15.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CC Attributions for assets visible in this image that need attribution:
- Sleeveless Shirt: punkduck