Of horses and maidens...

Sorry I haven't posted anything in quite awhile, but I've been doing a lot of modeling and re-modeling... As I said, this whole project is for my personal animation education, so I'm just taking it one thing at a time, and thoroughly mastering each step before heading to the next one. And I am happy to say that I'm to the point where I can easily model simple meshes pretty fast! I know I don't know all the tips and tricks; indeed, "the more I learn the less I know"! But I'm happy with the progress I've made over the past few months, so that is all that counts!

But now, turning to the little bit of progress I have made. I've learned that LEGO company is profusely swayed towards feminism! I know it sounds scary, but it's true. What do modern LEGO girls look like? Men with long hair, or sometimes not even that...
And what do period LEGO girls look like? I don't know. I guess they're only drawings on simple boring LEGO blocks... Looks nice in a picture, but start animating them and you will soon see how stiff and unnatural they become!
So with those two models staring me in the face, I had a decision to make regarding my female actors. I decided to chart new waters and create my very own model. The difficulties? I would have to create a dress that looks like plastic, yet still reproduces the feminine qualities of modesty that the dresses back in the early 1800's portrayed. And then there's the problem with walking. When a real young lady walks with a dress on, her legs move the dress back and forth allowing her to walk. How do you reproduce that if you're supposed to make it look like rigid plastic? After several attempts, I was finally able to create a simple yet good-looking dress style that still allows for free motion of the legs underneath. This will be one of the main things in this film that are truly of my own creation!!!
And then there's the horses. I loaded a picture I took of a LEGO horse (believe me, I've used real LEGOs as references throughout the entire modeling process!!!) and traced around it to make a 2d horse. I then extruded it into a 3d model; it was that simple! The tail was a little more difficult, because it had many tiny grooves in it which took me quite awhile to make, because of all the vertices I had to move around... But anyway, here's a quick screen shot of my horse right now, with only simple materials mapped to it. Don't worry, I'll have way more detail on the final product.
Other than that, I'm even now trying to figure out how to link my different models into one main file for the actual animating part, and then I'll start animating the actual film! But of course that won't be 'till after we record the audio...