Goon #1: Sam

This is the character who threatens Bir at the climax of the film.
(His name is Sam because Brittany thinks he looks like Sam Waterston)




Here's how I got there:

Step 1: Start with Maqbool


Step 2: Get rid of all the hair and modify the base model so the face starts to look different



Step 3: Start adding back hair, eyes, etc., and try to tweak each component as it's added


Step 4: More tweaks after a review with colleagues - add a widow's peak, get rid of the beard, and a nose job. (He resembles my dad slightly, which is not surprising since I used a picture of my father as a loose reference.)


Final: More tweaks, a change of clothes and some stubble.



The base mesh looks like this:


Final Final: Oops. I got some more feedback saying that he was too handsome. So this is the new and more evil Sam after I made his features more angular.

Prayer reference

Some references for Scene 3, when Maqbool prays on the train.

Fighting

This the first pass on the beginning of the riot. There will be more characters added, but I'm trying to get the blocking/edit down.

V1:



V2: Tighter shot on the two characters fighting

Look Test

First pass render/composite:

Massive woes

I've been unable to import mocap data into Massive without crashing. After some more debugging, I think that the problem comes down to the fact that I am using Maya 2008, whereas Massive only appears to work with Maya 8.5. This incompatibility is probably also what caused all my camera headaches a couple of weeks ago.

For example, when I save an animated camera using Maya 8.5, the end of the file has the following snippet:

connectAttr "persp1_visibility.o" "persp1.v";
connectAttr "persp1_translateX.o" "persp1.tx";
connectAttr "persp1_translateY.o" "persp1.ty";
connectAttr "persp1_translateZ.o" "persp1.tz";
connectAttr "persp1_rotateX.o" "persp1.rx";
connectAttr "persp1_rotateY.o" "persp1.ry";
connectAttr "persp1_rotateZ.o" "persp1.rz";
connectAttr "persp1_scaleX.o" "persp1.sx";
connectAttr "persp1_scaleY.o" "persp1.sy";
connectAttr "persp1_scaleZ.o" "persp1.sz";

On the other hand, in Maya 2008 the same section looks like this:

connectAttr "persp1_visibility.output" "persp1.visibility";
connectAttr "persp1_translateX.output" "persp1.translateX";
connectAttr "persp1_translateY.output" "persp1.translateY";
connectAttr "persp1_translateZ.output" "persp1.translateZ";
connectAttr "persp1_rotateX.output" "persp1.rotateX";
connectAttr "persp1_rotateY.output" "persp1.rotateY";
connectAttr "persp1_rotateZ.output" "persp1.rotateZ";
connectAttr "persp1_scaleX.output" "persp1.scaleX";
connectAttr "persp1_scaleY.output" "persp1.scaleY";
connectAttr "persp1_scaleZ.output" "persp1.scaleZ";

Even a non-programmer can tell that these two code blocks are semantically identical, Maya 2008 is just more verbose than Maya 8.5. Still, that's all it took - when I copy-paste the same code block from my Maya 8.5 file to the Maya 2008 file, everything works like a charm.

Animation!

Even though it might seem that all I do for my thesis is collect references, I have been known to animate on occasion. I have a nice long segment done, there are bugs in it but I think it's mostly there.



(As for the titlecards, I've never really liked them and I am playing around with the idea of replacing them with some narration from the boy - same information, but instead of saying "1 million people" maybe the boy can say "lots of people". This will move the intro more towards the boy's POV. The problem is that I already have some dialogue in the film where the mom tells the boy that India has been partitioned. So the boy's narration in the beginning shouldn't make this dialogue redundant since I've already animated it).

More crowd stuff - Salaam Bombay

Salaam Bombay is one of my favorite Indian films (everyone should watch it), and there's a good crowd scene at the end. In fact, it's not too hard to find a couple of shots from this clip in my film :)