Degree Type
Honors Capstone Project
Date of Submission
Spring 5-1-2010
Capstone Advisor
Heath Hanlin
Honors Reader
Andrew Fedak
Capstone Major
Art
Capstone College
Visual and Performing Arts
Audio/Visual Component
no
Capstone Prize Winner
no
Won Capstone Funding
no
Honors Categories
Creative
Subject Categories
Art and Design | Graphic Design
Abstract
The 3D animation, “Meet Pig Guy,” is an introduction to the character Pig Guy, who I have designed over the past year and a half. Pig Guy is a world renowned super-hero that is enormously successful in his professional endeavors, but has flaws, shortcomings, and imperfections that make him very human. In this one minute and 20 second long animated short, we get a glimpse into his behaviors through a candid situation of himself in his basement. “Meet Pig Guy” presents us with a problem of his, the abuse of his superpower to eat anything he wants.
My work over the last year and a half has put a great emphasis on building the character, Pig Guy, to a point where he has the viability to be used over and over again as a lead character in animations. Because I had these long term goals in mind, I found that it was best to create a short that did not have the typical basic story structure of beginning, middle and end, as well as an obvious character arc. I wanted my character to keep his problems during the animation, to show that the depth of the character went beyond a superficial surface. The style of the animation itself has a reserved use of classical animation conventions, since I wanted to give the character a greater sense of humanity. I was not looking to reach motion-capture level movement by any means, but I did want to move closer to that end of the spectrum, away from classical traditions.
This animation was done almost entirely through the computer program Lightwave 3-D, which consists of two separate programs, Modeler and Layout. All asset building was done in Modeler, while all of the animation work is done in Layout. The general pipeline I followed for my animation was six months modeling and texturing these assets, about five months of rigging the Pig Guy character, and a month and a half of animating. Basic post-production work for my animation was done with use of programs Photoshop, After Effects, and Logic Pro.
In the end, I am proud and excited with completing “Meet Pig Guy” because I still have great intentions for this character. This work was a necessary step to take in my future career of computer art, as I had my first extensive opportunity to tackle the rigging and animating phases of the animation process. Of course, like any creative work, there are things I could have done different with the final product and with the process I took to get to the final product, but I also learned so much that I would not give up this new found wisdom for anything. My career will be forever benefited by “Meet Pig Guy”, both in endeavors with the Pig Guy character himself as well as all other creative work, whether animation based or not.
Recommended Citation
Lebson, Michael, "Meet Pig Guy: An Animated Character Study in 3-D" (2010). Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All. 312.
https://surface.syr.edu/honors_capstone/312
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
