BWC 2010…

It’s hard to believe that an entire year has gone by since last years Blender World Cup, but the beginning of June marked the start of this year’s competition.  It’s an interesting theme this year in “Larger than Life” (Stop Motion) (full description here) and is sponsored by the external unbiased renderer Indigo.  I was really happy with the way last year’s competition went.  I felt like I learned a lot of different techniques and I was also excited that I completed a full image, along with being picked for a commendation prize.  Hopefully this year’s goes even better!

This year’s theme is essentially trying to create an image that mimics a real life stop motion film.  The theme brings about some interesting challenges because it’s basically trying to create a real world fantasy world.  In other words, the image should be a fantasy world, but look as if it’s realistic.  Challenging!

I’m a big Tim Burton fan and have decided to go about trying to create something in his style.  Here are a few screen captures from The Corpse Bride that are giving me some inspiration. I’ve marked off some of the things that I like about each of the images.  I really like the moonlight/washed out effect that Burton uses in a lot of his work (Nightmare Before Christmas) and the top left and bottom right images use that effect nicely. The concept sketch on the left by a user called malefico is also a nice illustration of this mood (he is an amazing concept artist and also a very good blender user, I encourage you to check out his blog).

In order to save myself some time, my concept is to use my mad scientist character in this year’s entry.  This works out quite well actually because he is very long and spindly much like Tim Burton’s characters.  He’ll definitely need to be re-textured to match a claymation/stop motion style, but it will certainly save me some time modelling.  Unfortunately I’ll have to redo the hair as well, I was really happy with that hair too!  I do like Lord Barkis’ hair style in Corpse Bride, so that’s what I’ll be aiming for.

Here is a really quick concept sketch of what I’m going for with this image.  The premise is a frankenstein’s lab type image with the scientist in the foreground on one side with a monster strapped to a table in the background on the opposing side.  For the background I’m thinking an old stone wall on one side with some old worn windows on the other side letting in the moonlight.  I like the composition in this setup for a couple of different reasons, quickly illustrated here.  The scientist’s body roughly follows the rule of thirds and also creates some nice lines that draw the viewer into the image, at least, that’s the attempt anyway!

Putting it into practice is another thing altogether.  The following images were my first compositional tests, along with a test to see if Indigo was going to work for me.  These are obviously just test renders with no materials and block objects in, but you get the basic idea.  Indigo seems to work OK on my system, although it’s a little finicky with how everything is setup.  I’m liking composition number four as of right now, however the scientists head needs to come up a bit and the table needs to move over to the right a tad.  The depth of field is nice though!

The next step is to finalize the composition and work on modelling.  Wish me luck!