I started modelling Yves' tall scarecrow that he will need for his dancing sequence.

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The head, hands and feet are modified from Scarecrow and the rest I am doing from scratch.
I intend to bring him to a likeness of your drawing, Yves, but the mouth will stay in a neutral pose for rigging.
The waste will be tighter and the folds of his pants will be accentuated. The bowtie will be made more ribbon-like and the centre of the hat will be lifted slightly so that it fits this scarecrow's head without penetrating. Buckles and belt and chest to come.

What do you imagine for his eyes, Yves? Is the dark area around his eyes painted on or is it a deep recess?

Please let me know if you want this, Yves, (someone else might already be working on it for all know), and if so what changes you would like.

Slight update for buckle, chest sacking and larger buttons. Also turned off the eyes to make him more like the drawing. I also just noticed that he shouldn't have a belt so I'll remove that and add some wrinkles to show the tension in his jacket.

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Or in white:
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That looks fantastic, Paul. Well done

I agree, looking great Paul! Wow--that second scarecrow has some flamboyant fashion tastes!

Great job so far. Martin was going to have me do all of them, but I'll settle for Fatty McFatfat .

That is a very good start Paul. Here is a model sheet to guide your modeling. BTW, it would be a good idea to check if a model is already assigned before starting to work on one so as not to step on someone else's toe.

Jeff, I'm preparing model sheets for the other Scarecrows. I think that modeling the fat one and the lady one will keep you buzy.

Thanks, Yves. Hey, doing three was stressful enough, haha. Go Paul!

Those character sheets will be great though.

Yes, I agree. Sorry about that, Yves and Jeff! I just started doodling this and I got caught up in the process. I should have asked for permission before posting. I am happy to scrap him if anyone has already started their own model or if anyone particularly wanted to do the modelling.

In the meantime I will make good use of your excellent model sheet, Yves.

Thanks for the positive comments, everyone.

Nice model sheet Yves. I could see some confusion coming from the size of SC though. Should his hat be added to the level of his head as you indicate?

The top of his head. Not the top of his hat.

Here is a bit of an update:

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I need to add a spline or two around the back of the shoulders and there is lots of tweaking to do. The smaller wrinkles, like those around button holes, I was thinking of doing with a bump map or displacement.

Is he still too cheeky?

That is looking good.

Yes. He's got almost no features in the face except the nose and the mouth. A squashed round head mounted on a wooden stick.

Something seems funny about the way the redingotte fall on the sides down the hips and around the legs From the render, It feels like it is pointed along the side.

I cannot watch your QuickTime. I get a page initialization error. Which codec are you using?

The codec is Sorenson3 but I have set it to loop at half speed in the player. If you are using an older version of QT it may cause this error, though no one has reported it to me before. Give me five minutes and I will replace it with a standard version.

Yes, the coat is about to get alot of tweaking. I will post another update tonight with less facial features and I'll put TWO Scarecrow in for comparison.

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Okay. Can you view this one?

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Added a standard Sorenson 3, looping movie to the previous post.
Let me know if you still have trouble viewing.

I painted the pencil scan in Photoshop. That should give you a better idea of how I see him (although my painting skills are rusted) and also, the forms are more obvious in the painting than in the line pencil drawing. Colorwise, I see him dressed generally in dark colors. His head and hands (gloves) are plain white for contrast. I would actually make his redingotte darker than in the painting.

About the QuickTime, it may be my Internet Explorer that is freaking out because if I download the file and play it directly in QuickTime, it works well. So I have a way to view your spins.

I'll let you tweak the splines since you seem to know where you are going. I'll comment later when you are ready and mostly finished tweaking. So far so good.

That looks good...

Nice work, Yves!

Here is how he looks next to our regular scarecrow:

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I will get some surface colours in the next render. (after lots of tweaking).
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In your painting, Yves, you give the impression that there are alot of specular surfaces. I'm not sure if that was intentional.
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(The rest of the tweaks will have to wait until tomorrow. Then there is flattening and texturing).

Something just went "Twang" while working on Skinny Scarecrow!
I was rotating a group of CPs, moved the axis and grabbed the manipulator to rotate. TWANG!
I received a bunch of exceptions but I didn't note them all down. Anyway it has totally screwed the model as you can see here:

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Just a few patches are visible so I looked at it in wireframe and noticed that the model still seems to be there. I turned on "Normals" and, as you can see, it looks like most of the patches are not recognised as valid patches anymore!

Luckily I can revert back to an earlier model and have only lost a couple of hours work but there is definitely something amiss with that rotate command.

Can you post the dud model? Or report it.

Click to view attachmentHere he is.
Dudley.

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Let me know if you can work it out. I've moved on to modifying a previous version though so I won't need this model back.

Here's a 360 of where I am now:

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I have tried both particle hair and modelled hair but unfortunately lost them when Dudley went deadly but I will set them up again. Are you wanting dynamic hair, Yves? Also, are you intending to use cloth, (collision detection), on the coat tails?
Thanks.

Solution: Move a cp and undo. That clears it up for some reason.

Cool!

Bizzare...but cool.

Thanks, Ken!

This is progressing really well.

No need for dynamics on this character. Not for hair or clothes. This character is not going to dance. He will do a choreography while signing but we won't see his coat tail dangling while he does that. He will also walk but again, we won't really see him full-shot while he walks. Concerning his hair (or straws), he have very few and they should be rigid so no need for dynamic there too. We'll add dynamics if we ever find that they are needed but for now, I don't see the need for it.

In the attached image, I marked in white a few spots I feel need attention:

1) The scarecrow doesn't have buttocks so the coat should fall more uniformly.

2) The head profile should be more rounded. This Scarecrow (as well as the 2 others) should have as less familiarity or resemblance as possible with our TWO Scarecrow. This is especially important since they will all sing together. They should not look like two brothers when seen side by side. That is why I made his head rounded and featureless so he have a very distinct appearance. Right now, the head comes from the TWO Scarecrow and his features are too obvious, like his cheeks, his chin and his flat face.

Not intentional. I wanted to paint light and shadows but doing that in Photoshop turned out difficult. I'm rusted and normally, I would use reference material for that sort of thing but I didn't have time to hunt for appropriate reference photos. Anyway. In fact his coat should be really dull, worn-out, a little discolored and quite dusty from being overused and under rough weathers, etc.. When textures, some colorfull patches should be added on the coat here and there and mainly behind the elbows.

Good stuff, Yves!
I'm on it.
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Has anyone had any breakthroughs in flattening recently? Ooooh, it's a pain.

I dont know how I missed this topic !!!
Excelent work Paul .. as always
when i saw the Yves' sketches I tought that would be funny if I modeled this character !!!!! But now he is in a good hands ( as we say here in Brazil )
keep the goooood work !!!

Thank you, Marcos!
We have the same saying here in the UK too, but without the "a". "A" is singular and I have two hands. "Now he is in good hands". (English lesson over)
I could use some lessons in Brazilian/Portuguese.

I've been doing the UV assignments and have them all on one map now. All except the head that is. I have spent quite alot of time removing features from Scarecrow's head for this model but I find the process very counter-intuitive. The reason that I wanted to use this head in the first place is that it has all the facial groups already assigned so it should make the FACE rigging that much quicker. Now, though, I have decided to model another head from scratch but after a couple of hours without saving I received an error and lost it so I will start again later.

It should be possible to start with TWO Scarecrow head and push and pull CPs to fit a more uniformly rounded form. One way it could proceed is using a deformation cage on the face part, deform the face forward so it better fits a squashed rounded head. Once the face mostly fits the rounded form, push and pull individual CPs (in mirror mode) to flaten out the features such as cheeks and chin. A top and bottom squashed sphere can be used to guide the deformation of the face into the proper form.

Skinny scarecrow is 3871 patches. ( That is for Zaryin, who is worried about his 800 patch, Fat scarecrow )


I'm still pushing and pulling CPs around. Also started testing displacement and discovered something strange. I used 50 % grey as the background colour of my displacement map, believing that this should represent 0% displacement. I then sketched in some rough wrinkles with white and blured. When applied as a displacement map at 500% I found that displacement was occuring in negative and positive directions when I only expected it to displace in a positive direction.
Anyway, reducing the displacement to more realistic levels seemed to fix this.

I have two scarecrows now. This one has the modified head from TWO scarecrow and some rough displacement on the coat:
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This scarecrow has a new head and I just started on the straw hair:
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Both need lots of attention with modelling and texturing.
I will do another head which looks more like Yves' painting.

I got to say that I like that new head better. I don't know if that makes it harder for you or not, haha.

Between those two (I mean not yet seen the new one you are working on), I like the second one (04b_04). One observation : the hat will need to be deepened (not sure this is a word) to fit the new head depth.

Displacement map of 500% means 5cm (2 inches) displacement. This seems to be quite a lot.

A quick update on the new head:

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Yeah! I like that one. Really nice with the right melancolic mood.

Haha, that one is perfect!

That looks fantastic! Reminds me of Jack Skellington from Nightmare before Chrstmass

If you want to get ahead get a hat.

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I noticed in Zaryin's "Fat Scarecrow" thread that Yves mentioned he would like pumpkin-head to have a tongue so I was wondering about Skinny scarecrow.
I borrowed TWO scarecrow's tongue and made it fit into this guy's mouth but I don't know what colour or texture would be appropriate for him. Can I have your thoughts on this Yves? Also, in your painting, you show straw coming out of the bottom of the head and it creates a sort of beard, a bit like Shaggy, from Skooby-Doo. Would you like me to remove the tie and ruffle that I have put in that location and just have the straw instead?

This head has a few changes from the previous one where I have tried to push the expression closer to your painting, Yves. This head still has more contours than the head in your painting but I can continue to reduce them if you like.

Yes. they all need a thongue.

I didn't think of this issue. Since his head is white, I would say the inside of his mouth and the thongue should be a gray. Say 50% gray. I don't think a texture would be necessary given that those Scarecrows will not be seen close-up.

I'm not against the tie and ruffle. They don't break up with the character and it adds some finishing. But you could easily try to scale down the tie and ruffle so we can compare. I tend to think that the neck area needs to be buzy-less though since he already have a neck tie so in order to compare, we would need to see the results along with the body.

Thanks for the thumbs up, Jeff, Dhar and Yves.

Here is the new head on the body:
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I'm going to concentrate on the texturing for a bit now.
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I have just discovered that it is not a good idea to put all of the UV mapping onto one decal if you intend to use displacement. Doing so will mean that A:M gets bogged down calculating displacement for every surface of your model even if many parts do not require it. Logical really. So I will have to do the mapping again and I will probably restrict displacement to the coat.

Looks good!

Reading the note by David Simmons on the Fatty Scarecrow thread, it might not be adviseable to go too deep into texturing right now.

Hi guys, Martin asked me to rig one of these dancing scarecrows. Questions about this one:
Are you guys planning a separate setup for his jacket? cloth simulator, dynamic constraints? or just make it part of the body?
Don't you think it's better to have his mouth closed for FACE installation? or that smile will be his default pose?

Good point! I will commit Skinny Scarecrow to the SVN. As I haven't progressed far into remapping this model I won't be losing any work so the timing of this alert is good. Thanks, Yves and David!



Please see THIS post from earlier in this thread. Basically there won't be any dynamics, cloth or otherwise.



Yes. Skinny will have a neutral default pose on his face. The facial pose shown here was just to demonstrate that he can achieve a rough copy of the pose in Yves' painting.

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Ok, thanks Paul. Great work on the modelling. I'm going to take the Fatty Scarecrow first for rigging so the Tall Guy is free for anyone who wants to rig him. This is really a good looking model, good work Yves & Paul, I hope I didn't leave anyone out

I have just committed Skinny Scarecrow to SVN and I noticed that the "Revision, Author and Date" fields didn't update. I hope it went through okay but thought that I had better mention this.

Thanks Paul. Good work.

I noticed that Skinny Scarecrow has been rigged so I thought that I would wake him up:

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I note that you have made a few changes, Yves. That's a better bowtie.

Nice rigging, Mark!

Well, now that he is awake it's back to you, Yves.