Making Giants - The Plant

Music : [intro music]
Joey Korenman : While I was recording and making this episode, it struck me that the tone of this video and probably the last two as well are very different than the first two videos where we went over the idea and the story in the animatic, you know, the technical challenges of modeling and rigging and texturing and animating are very different than the challenges of coming up with an idea and planning shots and editing an animatic. So it really drove home to me, the reason that bigger companies have a pipeline in place to help carry a project from department to department. See this makes sure that the story people can work on the story and the people who are really good at moving cameras around and laying out shots can do that. And people who are really good at figuring out complex rigs, they can focus on that. And while it's not that black and white, uh, as motion graphics artists, we tend to spread ourselves out a bit more, which is cool, but it can also be stressful because you're forcing your brain to do two very different things, solving creative problems, and then solving technical problems. Anyway, prepare for a geek Fest because this video is all about creating the plant. This one right here, and first I need to flesh out what this thing is going to look like a bit more. My initial sketches gave me some ideas, but I didn't really have any specifics mapped out as far as the shape of the vine, the relative size of things and what the head and face of this plant would look like. I brought in some more reference from Pinterest and started sketching.
Joey Korenman : I ended up here and there are some things that I learned. One the shape of the stem or the vine is really important because it sort of implies a posture for the plant. I wanted it to look really fluid, but also have some inherent strength to it, I guess, almost like it was proud, but I wanted it to feel a little bit delicate too. So I made part of it a little bit thinner. And two, I really loved this reference image, uh, that I found of this plant. It had this cool spiral pattern. And so I use that as a reference for the face of the plant. And I tried a couple of things with the pedals and ended up liking it better when I had pedals that sort of wrapped around the face of the plant. So now we've got a basic design for this plant, and now we can hop into cinema 40 and start modeling.
Joey Korenman : So the first thing we want to do is load in our reference image into the front here so that we have something to kind of go by when we're setting up our plant. So I'm going to go into my options here, go to configure. And, uh, over here, I'm going to want to go into this back section here and I'm going to add a background image. All right. So I'm just going to click on these little dots and we're going to go into the giants folder and grab that Photoshop file. Okay. And it's just going to load it right up for me and I'm going to move it. I'm first going to make it a little bit bigger and then I'm going to offset the why. And I basically want to use this piece of the artwork to line up the shape of that plant.
Joey Korenman : All right. So I'm kind of lining it up with the origin and there we go. And the cool thing about doing it this way is that now I can zoom in and out and, you know, and it maintains that background image for me, and I'm going to make it a little bit transparent, right? So it's not overwhelming everything that I'm looking at. All right. So what I want to do is create a nice spline that this, you know, this plant can kind of grow out of now, thinking ahead, okay. Because we're going to be rigging this plant to be able to move and grow an animate. If I just draw a spline, I'm going to be limiting the ways I can animate this. Right. Because what if I want this thing to kind of bend or curl or do something like that to do that with a spline, I'd have to use a, deformer like a bend deformer, which might work, but you have, you don't have as much fine control as you do.