The Flour Sack – Modeling

 Designing and creating the animation.

Kitchen and Dining Room

From the earliest stages of this project, I knew that I wanted to base it in my kitchen and dining room. There were few other rooms in the house that offered the same amount of space or natural light, nor were there any other rooms in the house that immediately sprung to mind when animating a sack of flour.

kitchen_orth
[Orthagraphic Plan]

I measured and drew an orthographic plan of my kitchen, using software like Illustrator and even MS Paint. The plans were imported into Cinema 4D, on planes, and used to begin modeling against for accuracy.

Kitchen - Corner
[Kitchen Model – Cinema 4D]

Later, I added a toon shader in Autodesk Maya. I had decided to go for a more colourful theme, rather than the black and white designs from the concept art stage. I’ve personally found I prefer to model in Cinema 4D before rendering and animating in Autodesk Maya.

Kitchen - Corner Final
[Kitchen Render – Autodesk Maya]

In the early designs, I had intended to animate the entire piece with a monochrome, sketchy background. It was entirely do-able, using Cinema 4D’s UV Mapping software to make my own UV Maps and draw them in Photoshop. It would have given the piece an entirely different final result I am sure.

Fridge_Texture
[Texture – Fridge Early]

The entire kitchen would have looked something like this…

Kitchen - Early Version
[Kitchen Model and Texture – Cinema 4D]

But after playing around with toon shading and block colouring in Autodesk Maya (render tools as well as the Hypershader), I ended up with this instead. I decided it was much more fitting for my story.

Kitchen - Final Version
[Kitchen Render in Autodesk Maya]

The Eggs

The eggs remained very much like their concept: egg shaped and egg coloured with little black dots for eyes. I modeled them in Cinema 4D and used Autodesk Maya’s Hypershader for colouring and texturing. The eyes were separate, attached parts that I could squash and stretch for expression.

Eggs ConceptEggs Final

The Flour Sack

The Flour Sack itself was a rigged mesh I found on Creative Crash, made by Joe Daniels. There was quite a selection of rigged models I could have used, but his one had the right charm and “plump” look I was going for. It matched up to my drawing pretty well.

Flour Sack ConceptFlour Sack Final

I ran the model through the same toon shader as the scene and got the desired results. I will definitely be using this method in future animations.