The Gingerbread Man
The Gingerbread Man was made as part of my 3d Character Animation class. The project was to create a puppet and animate it giving a lecture to children about what their job is. I created the character of The Gingerbread Man for a role-playing game based on the Marvel comic world, through this game his back story was formed. The Gingerbread Man was the world’s best baker but the world’s second best baker was jealous so one night he pushed The Gingerbread Man into a vat of Gingerbread, but The Gingerbread Man was such a good baker he managed to fuse himself with the dough and became what we now know as The Gingerbread Man. His girlfriend re-bakes him every night and he tries to clean up the cruminals of society (but mostly of those in Las Vegas). He lives in Las Vegas because there is no other place in the world where a man made out of gingerbread could run around and not cause a stir.
Method: I used mostly subdivision surfaces to create The Gingerbread Man. The modeling for this was pretty difficult because I wanted to convey clearly that he was a gingerbread man but I also needed to show that he was made out of cloth. The other really difficult thing with this was getting the frosting outline for him to work, I ended up extruding a star shape around and then tweaking all the vertexs to get them to fit perfectly. In general I never copy and paste anything and I always tweak everything in my scenes a little so it’s slightly dismorphic in certain points. This helps give a feel of it being real (since we never really have perfectly smooth surfaces or perfectly circular balls). Animating this character turned out to be more difficult then I thought it would be at first. I chose to put him on a stick because I thought it would be funny, but it’s actually pretty difficult to emulate the motions a hand would make. I literally animated with one hand and held a stick puppet in the other. I would repeat the lines and see what I would naturally do with my hands and then immediately copy what I had done into Maya animation. The secondary animation proved to be just as difficult. I animated the limbs and head to move slightly with the overall movement, which is how something like this would work in real life. It’s hard to notice, but there actually is a lot of noticeable difference between slight motion and no motion, the slight motion helps add a bigger sense of realism. The candy cane was also pretty difficult to animate. I had originally planned to use hard bodied dynamics but quickly found that the bugs inherit in that along with the problem of somehow creating a realistically reacting string for it to be attached to would be nearly impossible. In the end I animated it all by hand from what basic knowledge I have of how things move. A lot of it would be animating for a while then playblasting what I had just done, at which point I would see what looked good and what looked bad and then editing the parts that looked unrealistic.