The Art of Dressage with Mitt Romney

By posting this today I hope I’ll stop tinkering with it and move on to something better. As you’ll see, it’s hardly well directed satire and is really nothing more than a prolonged test bed for my first attempts at using dynamically generated cloth. Those experiments began with the reigns to the horse and then the form of a flag. The old man’s coat came last and was a nightmare to figure out. Word to the wise: pre-cache your dynamic materials and turn them off completely when animating. Needless to say, I’m probably doing everything wrong but these two rules seemed to work for me.

The ending isn't quite what I wanted but I haven't yet figured out how to make liquids create a reasonable spurt of blood. On reflection, it's probably best without it.

Parts of this were rendered in software, others on the graphics card. iRay (the renderer I’ve grown to love in the past due to it using my CUDA card) doesn't allow you to tile textures. Seems like one the dumbest features to leave out of a rendering engine but what do I know? The whole thing just doesn't work (or doesn't work for me). Hence, I had to render all the city scenes in software, making the whole job more laborious than it should really have been and making for a noticeable difference in the look of the two parts.

As for the film itself, it’s a rambling mess poking fun at a target which is now probably beyond satire. Saying that, he’ll probably win the Presidency and throw us into a new Ice Age where fundamentalist types force us all to wear nylon pantaloons and quote randomly from the Bible.

Next up, I’m thinking of spending some time improving the quality of my models and texturing by rendering a still image. I can only render low detail animations on my machine but might be able to do something of more quality if I restrict myself to a single image. I really want to figure out subsurface scattering and realistic human skin.

The Mitt Romney Puppet

After my previous attempt at doing David Cameron's voice (see below), I wanted a break from the voice acting. Besides, this was just meant to be a simple test of some rigging techniques that I had hoped would speed up my workflow. The main problem I have is with rigging a puppet once it’s been modeled and painted. One of the shortcuts I’m trying is to reuse hands – always the trickiest part to rebuild. I’ve now created some hands with controls that I can easily manipulate to move individual fingers. I’ve used them on about three animations with increasing success. The only problem is that I had no idea how to connect them to the rest of the model when, in this instance, the character has his sleeves rolled up. I tried hand with attached forearms but that didn’t work despite numerous attempts over the weekend. In the end, I’ve created separate forearms and stuck the hands on the end of the arm, leaving an unsightly join. I think I’ll have to think of a better way – perhaps making the whole arm separate putting the join at the shoulder where it’s less noticeable.

I’m also getting to the point where I think I should try something a little more ambitious and make a proper short animation. The only problem is that I’m completely at a loss as to what I should try. My main interest is satire but anything I make with a satirical edge will probably be out of date by the time it’s made…