The Plan

A short animation created by a team of eight: myself and seven other students of the Texas A&M Visualization program. As a team, we brainstormed the initial concept, produced story development materials, and took that story to completion. The Plan was created over the course of about three months— mainly using Pixar’s Renderman, Autodesk Maya, and Adobe’s Substance Suite.

Thanks to my team:

Toby Johnson

Sarah Marek

Rachael Fikir

Eunjin Lee

Emilie Sangerhausen

Elizabeth Gunter

Hope Poulter

My Contributions

For this project, I rigged the characters, animated approximately half of the shots, implemented the hair card system, and handled most all of our pipeline and file management.

The Rig

The rig is a relatively standard biped rig with a fully joint-based facial rig. That was copied across the different mice and scaled differently to get minor differences between the mice models.

The Animation

I ended up animating the opening shot and every shot after and including Harold’s volunteering. It was a fun challenge animating group dynamics so that the mice’s reactions worked on their own and in the context of the group conversation. It was also interesting to work on lipsync with the preliminary audio and without a tongue to manipulate.

Hair Cards

The hair card system was difficult to get working. We elected not to use XGen because it has a lot of rendering issues on our school pipeline, so I spent the first half of the project developing a script that allowed us to “groom” hair cards based on the normals of the underlying geometry and a user-defined NURBS curve. I also experimented with different surfacing methods, and with Toby Johnson and Rachael Fikir’s help was able to get the final result shown above.