Penguin animation | December 2018-January 2019
Background
Back in 2009 I started a blog about Club Penguin (yeah, that really popular online community). Eventually this led to making original digital art based on the penguin I created for my blog and the people who followed it. Around by the year 2013 when I was about to start High School, I had this desire to animate, so I drew on paper a simple walking cycle for a penguin and then, digitally, added some clothes, color and life to it. I consider it my first real animation (even though if you scroll through the videos of that channel, you’ll find a couple of static and simple animations).
The process
Then, back in 2016 I tried to make a 3D model of a penguin; even though I lacked the knowledge and experience of using a 3D modeling program and its tools, I tried it anyway, and to be honest, the result was not that bad. Unfortunately it got lost on my computer and I could not get it back. So I had to start from scratch; thankfully, this semester I had a subject on 3D modeling and got some basic notions of rigging, so this time I knew what I was doing. So, I began by drawing some references on Photoshop.
After having made the references, I went ahead and started modeling the penguin itself. The modeling processes did not take a lot of time, it actually took a day and a half. The rigging process on the other hand, was harder. At first, I used as a reference an image of a penguin skeleton, but then realized that this penguin did not share a lot of those characteristics, so I later went for a more “human like” rig. Right after I finished the rig and weight balance, I did the controls from which the animator could move the skeleton and penguin. Finally, the time to put the rig and controls to the test was here. So, for this part of the project, I animated the key positions on 16’s, and to smooth it out I later added inbetweens. Given the length of this character legs, I was not able to exaggerate some of the movements. To get an arc movement for the arm, the forearm carried a little bit of drag from the upper arm as it moved backwards.
Again, one thing led to another and eventually I found myself trying to make a believable facial rig so I could add more character to the penguin. For this I studied a little bit about facial rig and the amount of joints it should have to function on a believable manner.
So for the face, the rig also took a “human like” treatment for its positioning and behavior given the nature of the beak. I’m just gonna say that getting the weight balance “right”, especially around the mouth was one of the hardest things in the doing of this project. The expressions I tried to capture were mainly the ones I would often use on sketches for the art of the blog. The total number of expressions I tried are 6, where each one I think represents a major feeling: happy, angry, bored, guilt, ashamed and a wide smile.
I tried to make the expressions as similar as possible to the ones I drew by hand. Now, talking about the expressions and facrial rig, not every action is manipulated by the joints; given the complexity of the eyes and the fact that they share the same eyeball, I had to use a constrain on the geometry of the eyeball with the geometry of the pupil to get them moving through the non-spherical surface. The other action that did not use joints, is the eyelid movement: again, thanks to the non-spherical geometry of the eye. Instead I used blend shapes to get the blinking right and set a driven key to a slider; that gave it a more natural blink.
And that’s it, that’s everything there is about this personal project I unconsciously started about 5 years ago. From the first walking cycle sketch back in 2013 to the later 3D modeling and animation. I hope this will inspire you to accomplish your goals and finish your personal projects. That’s everything for now.
Waddle On!
Fernando Fontecha AKA Pinsnow.
