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Description
Ohhhhhhh man. It's finally done. Remember this concept art at all? This 1.5 min animation is the fruits of three people - ~Pspynett , *jinxhellbent and myself - working for about 7-8 months, creating, revising, scrapping, creating and stressing it into existence. ~Pspynett , being the one who introduced us to the glorious Mouse Guard comics by David Petersen, was director and did base models, effects, lighting, rendering and mouse animation (and you can see her version of one of the earlier animatics here ); *jinxhellbent rigged the owl and the mouse and did all the sound and foley work; I continued work on the models (kicking zbrush on my way past) and did UVs, textures, compositing and the large owl animation parts.

The mouse - as probably got mentioned somewhere in passing - is a younger Gwendolyn, for those of you who know the comics. Oh-so-tragically, we bought Actual Mice to reference, which were duly adorable and still are. The owl is based heavily on Bisto, a Eurasian eagle owl at a falconry centre near us, who we sponsor. He hasn't been stabbed in the head with a tiny sword. xP

And good grief I learned so much. I've developed a hilariously odd modelling technique that marries the topology control of maya with the smoooooooooooooooooothing and topology relaxing capabilities of zbrush, with the result that the unsmoothed versions of the meshes are very close to the subdivided ones. I've learned a bunch of new UV unwrapping tricks, and my texturing took a gigantic leap forward. Unfortunately this mostly all came at the expense of Gwen, who took about 4 times longer than the owl in most respects. Owl animation was hella fast with not much time to spare, but I think still came out well. Compositing done in Nuke, and took about 3 days nearly solid. @_@ Learnt a lot of techniques there, both hacky and legitimate. xD

~Pspynett and I will be re-rendering when we're more relaxed, on our own time, because there are MANY THINGS in the rendering we want to do better. No maya motion blur for one. That's being done in Nuke. |:

SO BASICALLY. I haven't been to bed for over 30 hours, but handed in at about 6am today...about 13 hours ago. Time for dinner!

Mouse Guard © David Petersen. Used with permission.

EDIT: ~Pspynett 's upload got a DD! Go and congratulate her :3
Also, we got featured on Comics Alliance !

Description
Ohhhhhhh man. It's finally done. Remember this concept art at all? This 1.5 min animation is the fruits of three people - ~Pspynett , *jinxhellbent and myself - working for about 7-8 months, creating, revising, scrapping, creating and stressing it into existence. ~Pspynett , being the one who introduced us to the glorious Mouse Guard comics by David Petersen, was director and did base models, effects, lighting, rendering and mouse animation (and you can see her version of one of the earlier animatics here ); *jinxhellbent rigged the owl and the mouse and did all the sound and foley work; I continued work on the models (kicking zbrush on my way past) and did UVs, textures, compositing and the large owl animation parts.

The mouse - as probably got mentioned somewhere in passing - is a younger Gwendolyn, for those of you who know the comics. Oh-so-tragically, we bought Actual Mice to reference, which were duly adorable and still are. The owl is based heavily on Bisto, a Eurasian eagle owl at a falconry centre near us, who we sponsor. He hasn't been stabbed in the head with a tiny sword. xP

And good grief I learned so much. I've developed a hilariously odd modelling technique that marries the topology control of maya with the smoooooooooooooooooothing and topology relaxing capabilities of zbrush, with the result that the unsmoothed versions of the meshes are very close to the subdivided ones. I've learned a bunch of new UV unwrapping tricks, and my texturing took a gigantic leap forward. Unfortunately this mostly all came at the expense of Gwen, who took about 4 times longer than the owl in most respects. Owl animation was hella fast with not much time to spare, but I think still came out well. Compositing done in Nuke, and took about 3 days nearly solid. @_@ Learnt a lot of techniques there, both hacky and legitimate. xD

~Pspynett and I will be re-rendering when we're more relaxed, on our own time, because there are MANY THINGS in the rendering we want to do better. No maya motion blur for one. That's being done in Nuke. |:

SO BASICALLY. I haven't been to bed for over 30 hours, but handed in at about 6am today...about 13 hours ago. Time for dinner!

Mouse Guard © David Petersen. Used with permission.

EDIT: ~Pspynett 's upload got a DD! Go and congratulate her :3
Also, we got featured on Comics Alliance !