Works in Progress

I know that my blog posts as of late have been heavy on the story development stage so to switch things up I’ve decided to show a bunch of my works in progress.

I have mostly been focusing on modeling the major props and characters.

Room and Furniture

So here is the room.

I like looking at it for this perspective because it reminds me of being a little kid and making shoe box house for my toys.

Here’s what it looks like inside.

t-posed Anna and half unwrapped chair. What a pretty picture. 

Designing the room took quite a bit of time. Victorian architecture tends to have a relatively heavy, masculine aesthetic that didn’t match the fragility of Anna and the porcelain dolls. To get a more delicate look, I decide step a little further back in time to the rococo era.

Victorian Room

Victorian Room

Rococo

Rococo or maybe Rococo revival which happen around 1840's (I think) and rococo influence pop up again around 1910ish

One the most irritating things about making a period piece is dealing with the time’s idiosyncrasies. For example when gathering reference images for chairs, I discovered that not only are there different kinds of chairs for specific areas of a house but male and female versions of chairs.

These are parlour chairs. The one with more defined arm rests is the man’s chair and the curvier one is for the ladies.  

I really like the look of male parlour chairs so that’s what I modeled. I’m not sure how accurate it is to have the man’s parlour chair in a little girl’s room but I honestly don’t think anyone will care. 

Here’s a vanity.

Because of the elaborate nature of the Victorian era most of my props are going to need displacement maps to get the extra details.

Here’s the couch model

Now in Zbrush 

And now I’ve messed up…

I think this look really cool even if it's not at all what I wanted 

And here’s the couch with a displacement map

Still a lot of texturing to do but we’re getting somewhere.

Mother and Doll Character

The Mother character’s face is never seen in my film so please ignore it.

Here are some reference images I used. 

When modeling this character I kept thinking about how uncomfortable all those layers of fabric would be; like wearing several heavy blankets all day. I can’t imagine how women survived the summer.

This is my first go at the Mother Character.

I like all of the layers of her dress.

However, after some consideration, I felt this version did not depict the attributed I wanted the Mother Character to represent.

I want the Mother character to feel cold, mechanical, stiff, and severe.

So I started again, this time focusing far more on the silhouette opposed to the layers of clothes.

This is where the Mother is currently.

quite a bit less detail but I think I can get in back in texturing 

Much better silhouette!

old and new

Here is Anna’s doll design.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep this on as the main doll. I need a lot of different doll designs for this film. Right now my plan is to model 3-4 hero dolls and then miss and match their parts as well as change their texture maps. Right now I only have 1.5 dolls modeled.

Here are some doll references.

I am surprised at how much faster I am at modeling now. Things that use to take me about a week I can now get done in a day. It’s a little uncanny but I guess I was bound to get better at this eventually.