www.taflove.com

Ah yes, Kilgore Trout strikes again! Wikki wikki wikki!!

The Beast is back, and this time, he's itching to satisfy a wicked donut craving.
Accompanying The Trout are his fellow brethren from planet Karnak to partake in an orgiastic feast of human flesh!! Woe unto those who consume cheap generic pastries in Hollywood today -- misery has descended upon Winchell's Donuts!!

Music: "Floyd" (also known as "Thoughtless") by Korn, off their album "Untouchables"

Lyrics:
"I GOT MY MONKEY, GOT MY MONKEY, GOT MY MONKEY, WAH AH!
I GOT MY MONKEY, GOT MY MONKEY, GOT MY MONKEY, WAH AH! "


I made this animation 100% myself, here is a brief shot breakdown:

modeling, sculpting, texturing -- Pixologic ZBrush, Autodesk Maya

Kilgore Trout is an original 3D digital sculpture created 100% by me, Mihchael Taflove
he is based on 2D concept art by Carlos Huante

matchmoving -- 2D3 Boujou
rigging, animating, HDR rendering -- Autodesk Maya, Mental Ray IBL

the charcaters have secondary dynamic jiggle on their skin
all walk cycles and animation were done by hand-keyframing, no motion capture here

Dynamics (ragdoll body parts, flesh jiggle) -- Autodesk Maya and ultra-modern nCloth, also old school lattices with soft body particles

compositing: Adobe After Effects
audio: Adobe Premiere

production notes:
In particular, a major technical challenge I faced in this piece occurred during the animation process. I was unknowingly animating onto 2 different "animation layers." As a result, the animation would only play correctly when I manually clicked "go to bind pose" on each character. If I did not click this every time I load my scene, my characters would experience "double transforms," mutating into weird limping twisted midget-things that looked terrible.

This became a major problem at render time. When it comes time to batch render, Mental Ray automatically makes a copy of your scene file and starts reading from it -- there is no human present to manually click "go to bind pose." Thus, my characters were rendering as weird limping twisted midget-things that looked terrible. As a result of this, I had to bake out all characters as a geometry cache. I also had to troubleshoot my rig, baking all IK into keyframes, and then baking all animation layers into a single layer, and deleting the corrupt layer that was causing the "double transforms" that were mutating my characters. After doing all this, finally my characters were rendering corrcetly, and the objects constrained to their hands (skulls, human body parts made of ncloth) were also moving correctly. (less info)