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, Filed Under: featured, guest artists, progress report, Raptor 2017, student experience

Week 8 Update – Raptor Report

The Raptor Team is quickly approaching the end of out prototyping phase and entering the final build. We have come a long way. Here is an update on the class happenings this week.

We were so fortunate to be able to host Zoe Morsette, a theatre artist that masterfully fabricates specialty costumes and props for screen and stage. Some of her brilliant work can be seen in Hamilton, the broadway musical Shrek, 30 Rock, and SNL,  just to name a few. We were so thankful to be able to pick her brain and get her feedback in class.

The skin team continues to cast skin and pattern parts for various areas of the body. They have specifically made progress with skin on the neck underneath the head and have further refined the patterned head shape.

The hands team has found a successful way to control the fingers with a glove/thimble system, and continues to make progress with the cosmetic details. The hands have more dexterity than ever this week.

Performer testing out raptor
Actor/Raptor

The structure has been able to make great strides in moving from skeletal elements to aesthetic ones. This week they had painted silver ribs and tail with design weaves throughout the structure. The foot and leg teams have developed a very successful hinge system that moves with the actor as they step. The foot stays attached the ankle well and no longer pops up as the actor transitions their weight from the heel to the ball of their feet. The knees and ankle have a great natural turn out that echoes the position of our little raptor model. This has been a challenge the past few weeks, so kudos to them for all of the work and creative problem solving they’ve put into this.

The lights team showing off their hard work

The light team continues to refine control of the modules via laptop and
have implemented LED stripes along with the EL wire. They are in talks with the costume designer regarding the aesthetic placement of the wires and are developing a plan to make and place an electric mount in the body.

 

Goals

Skin

11/13 Finger Sample

11/20 All skin cast (no paint)

Hands

11/13 Add fabric and cosmetic weave structure to hand

11/13 Arm sock

11/13 Start teeth and claws

11/13 Assemble 2 hand prototypes

Structure

11/13 Address back corners

11/13 Add rings on tail to assist skin team with dressing

11/13 Assemble 3 harnesses with ribs

Lights

11/13 Tackle mounting electric box in body

11/13 Three Raptor System

Taylor

11/13 Spray effect on eyes

Cait/Sam

11/13 Shoulder wrap and light source

JE

11/13 Build 3 raptor holders

Karen

11/3 Contact performers for measurements

, Filed Under: class resources, featured, guest artists, Raptor 2017

The Power of Collaboration: Bridging the digital divide

Building our future, together.

Last spring, I reached out to Radio Television and Film Faculty wunderkind Ben Bays and invited him to join us as a guest artist for our Enron Raptor class. Our Department of Theatre & Dance students have been raving about his visual effects and motion graphics classes for years. Ben wondered aloud about his possible contributions from a digital realm to the analog reality of our raptors, describing our world and project as so “physical, so plastic.”

Professor Ben Bayes, Department of Radio Television and Film

To me the connection is clear. We are addressing the same information and challenges with different tools. There is a commonly held notion in both the academy and the professional world that digital work is in the domain of one realm and the physical built world exclusive to the other. It is time to break these silos…

This space between is the where the magic lies, in the collaborative link between digital and physical. It is our superpower. Each strength builds onto the other. For example, Ben has worked with one of our T&D graduate costume technology students to sculpt models using Maya and Mudbox which were then 3D printed. These digital tools greatly enhanced the student’s traditional process and increased overall capabilities. She then took that information and moved the project into fabrication. Our Enron Raptor students are also doing this.

During Ben’s class visit we looked at the parallels between how a CGI animated figure is constructed, articulated, rigged, working through platforms like Maya, Mudbox, and nCloth, and building in the physical realm. All of these available for free at Autodesk for current students! As with all of our guest artists, Ben’s brief presentation spurred a flurry of activity from our students. Seeing how Ben rigged his virtual velociraptor inspired our structure team to reexamine their plans for building our physical armature. They have reassessed and adjusted the and rotation points of connection at various points on the body.

Ben’s raptor model in MudBox skinned in “honey”

Our mini velociraptor toy which has been our model for many of the design inspirations is off to the UT Foundry for its 3D Scanning. Lucky Girl. From there we can print and trace out large-scale patterns for forming our armature, print out blocks of foam to carve down into intricate detail for the head and feet. The trick here for our team will be to use this technology to speed them up, rather than slow down. If our students can cut and pattern foam to look like the head, feet, and other complicated details, we won’t need to slow our process down to build intricate digital files to 3D print those elements. Our team will use all tools at their disposal from masking tape to Maya, to speed our project along and create the three-stage ready, aesthetically captivating, cyberpunk Velociraptors to tell the story of Enron.

We celebrate this extraordinary opportunity of working with Ben Bayes to interconnect our disciplines. Our course was developed with a conscious commitment to building bridges between Texas Performing Arts, Theatre & Dance, Architecture, Engineering, and Radio, Television, and Film Departments to celebrate the strengths of these interconnected disciplines. We believe that this is the future of higher education. Develop teams to harness the full power of both the physical and the digital realms. Elevate one another to build a better future for Entertainment Design and Technology. Even the great film director Christopher Nolan prefers to shoot “in camera” (physical sets and environments) whenever possible, enhancing and expanding his world through CGI, rather than building the whole world virtually.

Interstellar (2014)

“This class sounds so amazing.  I think it is just an incredible idea that brings different areas together in a completely new way.  It’s like a class from the future!” – Ben Bayes

Ben Bays is an Austin, Texas, native and UT graduate who has produced a broad range of animation, motion graphics, concept art, CG models for a variety of media including television, feature films, and video games. Since 1998, he has been producing interactive content for various platforms including Gamecube, PS2, XBOX, GBA, GameboyDS, SO, IOS, and PC.   His game art includes isometric pre-painted backgrounds, full 3D environments, 2.5D platformers, tile-based destructible environments.  His specialty in interactive media has always been virtual worlds; concept to modeling, surfacing, lighting, simulations, and animation.  Over more than a decade in the video game industry, he worked his way from level 1 artist to environment lead to art lead on a variety of projects.  In 2008, he joined the faculty of the RTF department in The Moody College of Communications.  He has created and taught a variety of classes around storytelling in “new media”, a fluid term.  In addition to classes in traditional animation, visual effects, CG modeling and animation, he has been involved in the Immersive Media production classes, including several initiatives involving VR and AR.  In short, Ben is a New and Digital Media production specialist.

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/benbays/

http://benbays.blogspot.com/

Ben Bays
benbays@mail.utexas.edu

, Filed Under: class resources, facilitators, guest artists, progress report, Raptor 2017, student experience

Skin: The Fabric Of Our Lives

All three partners on the skin artistry team are tailors/dressmakers by trade. So, when tasked with the assignment of putting flesh on a velociraptor, our team decided to stick to what we know and approach this project as a sort of giant draping project. Draping a skin suit on a dinosaur should be simple, right?

First things first, who knows how to make skin? …Anyone? …Bueller? Ok maybe it is not so simple. To drape dinosaur skin, we must have it available, and skin is not easily purchased at your neighborhood fabric store.  Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to share the process of how our team made skin ‘fabric’ from scratch and how we are planning to cover our velociraptors with it. Essentially, we are making sheets of skin that can be patched together to make one giant blanket of flesh.

Step One: Sculpt That Skin

We started with sculpting a general dinosaur skin texture that had very organic curves and lines. These lines were used to hide the seams when multiple squares of skin were patched together.

Step Two: Hydrostone Template

Now that we had a general design of our skin, we made a hard copy of it that could be used to make repeat copies. We did this by making a Hydrostone slab that would serve as our template for most of the body.

Step Three: Latex and Mesh layers

First, we sprayed our stone template with mold release. Then we painted two layers of RD407 mask latex, and before the latex dried, we embedded a top layer of stretch mesh fabric. The mesh layer dried into the latex and gave us a porous fabric layer that will make attaching the latex to the actual velociraptor frame much easier later on. It will also help remove strain from the latex layers and make it less likely to rip apart.

Step Four: Painting the Latex

Using an airbrush and thinned out acrylic paint, we experimented with spraying the skin a generic lizard skin tone.

Step Five: Seaming the Skin Squares

Now that we had successfully made one 15”x15” layer of latex skin, our next step was to repeat the process and see how well two pieces of skin could be patched together. During this phase, we also draped a pattern on the velociraptor prototype out of muslin to give us a general idea of how much skin we would need.

This process can be repeated if necessary for creating varying textures for different parts of the velociraptor. Our method demonstrated here is primarily being used to cover parts of the dinosaur that have large surface areas with general dinosaur skin texture We are still in the problem-solving phase of how to make skin for very detailed parts of the dinosaur (face, feet, and hands). Stayed tuned for part two…

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