Westworld Animated- Old Greyhound

[Luke Marcatili]

Hi All,

Here's a scene I've been working on in spare time over the last little while. It's a recreation of a scene from Westworld, Season 1.



The purpose of the scene was basically to learn some new things which I did, so I suppose it was a success.

I got better at capturing subtle character animation and managing motion curves across various values to get more subtle and natural animation.

I developed a lighting method within Moho- though I don't think this is the best example of it compared to the other examples I've posted recently.

I experimented with a lip-sync method that allows tweening in mouth shapes, rather than using switch layers. I like the results in general, but I need to develop it further to make it faster and more accurate to use- the lip sync here is pretty sloppy.

I used Smart Meshes to create a parallax effect in the background art which was interesting- faster than rendering the room in 3D and animating a camera move there I think.

All the animation is in Moho, composited/assembled in After Effects, backgrounds painted in Photoshop.

Feedback welcome!

[Víctor Paredes]

This is great. I was watching Cosmos (not Carl Sagan's one, I'll save that for later) during the weekend and was thinking how much more expressive the character animation could be if done differently. I think this is very almost exactly what I was thinking about
It would be nice to see some behind the scenes of this project.

[Luke Marcatili]

Thanks Victor!

I remember watching Cosmos around the time it came out and I liked the style. Looking at it again now I can see how they would have been restricted by the rigs that they had available. Looks like AE/DUIK to me.

That's one of the things that has always appealed to me about Moho- the ability to use rigged 2D characters but also the idea of getting away from the stiff 'limited animation' look.

This scene is the closest I've gotten to what I envisioned along those lines so far and I think I could do something even better next time around.

I'll try to put together something to show some of my processes soon.

[Barry Baker]

This is excellent. It's a great example of how very subtle movements can be so expressive. I particularly liked the tiny shrug that The Anthony Hopkins character gives at one point, it is just enough to make the point.

[alanthebox]

I'm also interested in seeing/hearing more about these smart mesh background elements (if you do decide to create any sort of tutorial)!

[Luke Marcatili]

Thanks Barry- It really helped having the reference performance. It gave me a lot of ideas and subtle movements I wouldn't have thought of on my own.

Thanks alanthebox- I have been working on a tutorial for my lighting method and I will do one for this after that. It's something I have to squeeze in between other things so it's been a bit slow but you can check out this old video I did about my 2.5D Car Rig, which uses the same Smart Mesh method.