A rabbit is defined as, "a burrowing, gregarious, plant-eating mammal with long ears, long hind legs, and a short tail.".
When our two rabbits (rabbit_a, and rabbit_b) first showed up in our storyboards I didn't think much of them. They were two innocent bystanders caught in a crazy world of monsters, sheep and wranglers. a.k.a. Eat Sheep!
Their presence began to inspire a few questions, "What were they doing out there on the field?", "What were they talking about?" and "How do bunnies even come into being?" 🤔
They're existence starts with a line in a script!
The script is then handed over to our illustrator, the person responsible for visualizing the written word in a compelling way. This means the talented Paul Caggegi takes the wheel to begin story boarding in Blender.
For Eat Sheep we chose to stay within Blender for most illustrations and storyboards; wielding the Grease Pencil tool has opened up a few amazing opportunities to explore the story, but I digress...
It was important to us that the boards represent the shot as close as possible. Instead of a circle saying "rabbit here" we wanted to see the rabbit in the illustrated frame. A rabbit that looked as close to the rabbit we were going to create within Blender.
Early concepts of the rabbits
While the rabbits are arguably a small contributor to the film. You may be surprised to know how much time is spent on these tertiary details. This goes for films, game and web development. Teams spending a lot of time crafting every detail about the world we're taking the audience into. It's a fun job. ❤️
Once a shape or silhouette of the character was favored, we moved to creating modeling sheets and some action sketches.
Onward to 3D Modeling in Blender
Once we're feeling good on a concept, Paul will continue with the boards. In parallel Lucas Falcao will begin working on the character in Blender.
Similar to the 2D process, Lucas will share his modeling progress as he goes for feedback from Wayne Dixon (Co-Director and Animator). I feel its incredibly important to have the person rigging & animating the character to be working closely with the 3D character artist.
This leads to discovering limitations and opportunities with the model early in production, vs the 11th hour.
The above illustrates our conversation on how to best represent the eye in static while having enough material to animate with.
Handing the model over to be rigged in Blender
Once the model has been approved, it's handed over to Wayne to begin constructing the custom rig required to have our rabbit be terrified as Melvin comes charging.
You may be thinking, "It's a simple character that's not going to be on screen terribly long, how involved could it be?".
The Eat Sheep film asks a lot of our characters. Being artists we're passionate about putting our best foot forward, while flexing the ability of Blender. 🤘
Of course after you build a malleable rig, you have to test it!
