characters and creatures

One of my earliest victories for producing The Sword of the Watch was latching onto Reallusion’s Character Creator. I’d attempted 3D character work in NewTek LightWave years earlier, and I had this feeling of absolute despair in ever being able to get the work completed. Did it work? Yes. Was it practical? For me, no. A simple character was taking me months.

Character Creator changed all of that. Their workflow clicked, and characters began spilling out.

The second challenge was animation that looked like a person and not a puppet. After years of brute-force hand animation I fell on motion capture, and it was a game-changer.

Body and facial capture finally gave me a fast way to bring the geometry to life. The free Carnegie Mellon tests fit the budget, so I started there — rigging body motion into the models. Reallusion iClone put body and face in a package I could afford, and suddenly the motion looked convincing. That was huge. I worked until the capture sat inside the rest of the pipeline.

I soon progressed (all right, it was two years) to creating one or more characters in a day. Convincing ones — the kind you need for digital doubles and an animatic. The people of The Sword of the Watch were coming together in 3D. Now the job is tighter: every new model has to survive next to its Archive card and its Feature image. If the pug nose, the cloak clasp, or the ear is wrong, the model is wrong.

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