WEEK 2 - Fenrir Begins

Concept Art -

This week I am beginning to wrap up the concept art process for Fenrir. It’s been tough developing Fenrir’s look due to the characters' need to be able to speak. Obviously the mouth shapes involved in human speech can’t be directly translated onto the wolf. Instead I need to try and replicate the ‘feel of speech’.

In combination with the motion capture system, the rigging of Fenrir needs to have corresponding bones or blend shapes so that the same emotion can be conveyed from character to character.

Stylistically , the easiest way to do this would be the creation of a Human with beast-like qualities. This depiction definitely had a rise in popularity after the release of Teen wolf in 2011, with Grimm (2011), The Sims 3: Supernatural (2012) and Penny Dreadful (2014) all using the same style shortly after.

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Personally, I really dislike it. It just feels too human, so I can never feel the danger or excitement associated with the creatures part in the story . But that's not to say that it isn't useful, it’s a great alternative to when CG isn't an option like in a lot of lower budget productions. For this project it would also make everything so much simpler as the human face with no protruding muzzle would make the animations fit perfectly with the base humans. It just Isn't how I believe Fenrir to be depicted in Norse Myths.

Another approach is the wolf-human hybrid. There are lots of examples of this in film and TV as well, more often than not these characters are also able to talk . This provides excellent reference material as the basic facial shapes are more akin to what I need to create.

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The problem however, is that this style can often come across as a bit more cartoon like, (See the Wargen examples foe WoW) I will need to make sure the end result stays away from exaggerating certain aspects of the face too much to create the expression. Instead using the art style and subtle expressions, which can be seen in real wolves, to help convey emotions.

In most of the classical depictions I gathered of Fenrir he can be seen as a huge black wolf. As can be Seen in my Art Style Mood board: (Top Left is my own work)

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Fenrir’s general depiction is definitely based in realism. So on a scale of wolf to human he should anatomically be based on wolves rather than humans.

The most recent piece of animation that can be used as an excellent resource has to be ‘The Jungle Book’ (2016). The wolves in this piece are not only based in anatomical realism but talk. Clip: https://youtu.be/TZ6m9GJEFfc?t=119 1:56-2:06. Providing a perfect resource for how I need to rig Fenrir.

Fenrir needs to be very similar technologically to these wolves, the style of him however will be very different.

Fenrir needs to be much more imposing, chilling and intimidating. A creature clearly borne from myth and legend.

I’m starting by collecting a huge reference library of wolves, all with a similar profile to one of the seven universal emotions: Anger, Fear, Disgust, Happiness, Sadness, Surprise and Contempt.

When rigging blocking and rigging having reference to the FACS system will help in allowing the model to portray the correct emotions when acting.

Blocking and ‘Sketch Sculpts’ -

Using Zbrush Core 2020 I sculpted this piece quickly, paying attention to the textures and feel of character created, rather than the initial forms themselves. This means that the topology of the skulpt is really bad, you can see around the mane the excessive amount of poly tearing, which in this case I used to my advantage to create texture.

In the final skulpt however, this wouldn't be appropriate as I need smooth uniform topology for rendering, blend shapes in animation and UV’s.

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Textured -

The texturing here has been done using the poly painting feature in Zbrush using a small brush on an extremely high poly mesh for a more defined stroke.

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Textured (Flat Colour) -

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Adding the basic flat colour material in Zbrush core then shows off the potential this method has in creating depth and texture in the piece without the use of traditional 3D rendering. In the future I would like to try and hand draw these textures using traditional media, potentially by printing out a quickly sketched UV, such as the one above, as a guide then scanning the texture back in.

Rigging / MoCap Research -

A really interesting piece of research is that of Smaug from LOTR: Desolation of Smaug.

Benedict Cumberbatch voiced the character using Motion Capture software to use as a base for animation. The actual MCP data was never retargeted to a character, instead the performance was used to give animators a sense of timing and expression. In the Behind the scenes extra of this (towards the end of the clip) Joe Letteri (Senior VFX Supervisor) , Eric Saindon (VFX Supervisor) and Kevin Estey (Lead Animator) mention the difficulty of translating Cumberbatch’s performance onto a character with what is essentially ‘an alligator almost, with a big flapping jaw’. To counteract this they instead ‘pushed the whole performance to the front of his face’ as the mouth ‘didn't need to open too much to really get words out’

https://youtu.be/Wu9XPEdBelY?t=958

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