So far, my animation has leaned on situations rather than expressiveness to drive the story forward. My characters tend to eerily glide around my sets, forcing the audience to use musical and situational clues to guess how a character is feeling.

My latest project aims to eliminate this problem through its design. The protagonist pooch is confined to a tiny space and the animator is confined to her face to show the audience how she is feeling.

I approached Laika’s model with these restrictions in mind. Since she can’t walk or turn around, making armatures and detailed models for her feet is unnecessary. Instead, I was free to focus on her face, which requires the right mix of realism and cartoony expressiveness.

Initial wireframe model

The facial structure of a dog is elongated and low, as you can see in this reference image.

Everest, the reference husky

With expressiveness in mind, I raised the area around the eyes into only a slight slope down the muzzle. For the skin I used UV mapping, which I painted over a furry texture in the GIMP. The UV texture maps a 2D image onto a 3D object, as seen below, and ensures that the distribution of brown and white fur is seemingly random.

UV Mapping

I then duplicated the mesh. One became the skin and the other, with help from Blender’s hair simulator, became the fur.

Frizzy Dog

I had a hard time with the fur, in part because of limitations within the Blender simulation and in part because of the tricky guesswork involved in varying lengths of the hair over different regions of the head.

Slightly Better Fur

Much of the realism of digital fur depends on the lighting, so I turned my gaze to her eyes. They are based on the same models I have been using for years, with concave irises to collect as much light as possible from the rest of the scene. After experimenting with brown eyes, I decided on green eyes to match the beige green “70’s refrigerator color” of the hardware inside the spacecraft. I made the irises much bigger because dog’s don’t seem to show much white and to exploit their cuteness.

Big, green eyes

The nose is visually delicate. It still looks like it was simply glued onto the rest of the mesh, which is essentially what happened. One problem is that the skin was visible behind the nostrils, which can be easily fixed by a shadow of blackness. The harder problem was figuring out how to represent the pattern of tiny holes near the mussel.

Bigger eyes, wider tongue

I like the idea of imposing limits on my work to force a better film. There is no reason the audience should not read the dog’s face to figure out exactly how she feels about being launched into space against her will.

Much of the remaining work on the dog revolves around the animation. I need to decide whether to focus on realism or toonisim in Laika’s restricted motions. And so I expect the final mesh will undergo some minor motion-inspired tweaks before the final version.

In order to capture the pure joy at being the first living thing in space, my next film, Laika, calls for a beautiful, highly detailed Earth model. I realized that this is not the first time I have tried to create an Earth to fit a scene, so I decided to dust off my old models and compare them to my new model.

For the Ancestor’s Tale, I included a shot of an asteroid hitting the Earth 65 million years ago. For this model, I used a single sub-surfaced sphere mapped with a NASA Blue Marble image. The texture map was edited in The GIMP to distort the shapes and positions of the continents to account for continental drift. I duplicated the sphere and changed the material to a Blender halo effect to create the blue atmosphere.

Earth 1.0 in The Ancestor's Tale

Earth 1.0 has many problems, but the unrealistic lightening is perhaps the most glaring. I used multiple light sources in different locations to ensure that the sphere was illuminated almost uniformly, forgetting that there is essentially one light source in the solar system.

About a year later, in Primitive Welcome, I made a similar scene featuring the entire Earth against a field of stars. I used a high-resolution satellite photo, which included clouds, and mapped it around a more-heavily sub-surfaced sphere. The atmosphere was a simply a separate, slightly larger sphere with a transparent blue hue.

Earth 2.0 in Primitive Welcome

Earth 2.0 looks much more realistic because of the single light source and shaders which create the nice falloff effect on the dark side of the planet. The stars are too bright and too consistant for realism.

For the latest model, I followed this fantastic Earth tutorial by William Chamberlin to the following result.

Earth 3.0 in Laika

The tutorial led me through the process of using multiple spheres, each with different materials and textures, and compositing them all together using the node editor. The clouds, for example, are mapped onto a sphere which is only very slightly larger than the surface sphere.

Earth 3.0 will only be viewed from the point of view of the Sputnik 2 satellite, so the full Earth will never been in a frame. Instead, the audience will see the Earth from an angle like the one below.

Earth 3.0 (closeup) in Laika.

I am satisfied with the result and encouraged by the steady increase in image quality through the years. The end result of a frame of animation will always be a mixture of realism, technical limitations, and stylization. I have yet to develop the look and feel of this film, but conveying the beauty and distance of the Earth is essential to the plot.

My next film will be a three minute short about Sputnik 2 and its canine passenger, Laika. I have finalized the story, I have built the models, and I am ready to begin production.

Dog's Head Modeling

The project is so exciting because I see potential in capturing the dichotomy between the pure joy of being the first living thing in space the harsh reality of being trapped on a suicide mission.

Laika was found on the streets of Moscow and was deemed a prime candidate for space travel. Soviet scientists assumed that a stray dog would be well-prepared for the cold of space. Without much fanfare, she was placed in a tiny capsule on the top of a multi-stage variation of a German V2 rocket three days before the launch. She became the first animal in space before dieing from heat and stress several hours later.

The film opens with a close-up shot of Laika in a tiny, undefined capsule. She lazily opens her eyes and scratches herself. A low rumbling noise gets louder and louder until, in an instant, Laika’s eyes jerk upward and her ears perk upward in exaggerated surprise. The scene changes to a wide-frame view of the launch already in progress at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Model of Sputnik 2 Launch Site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome

It is essential to highlight the contrast between the hastily-designed R-7 rocket of Soviet engineering and the elegance of the evolved dog inside. During the launch sequence, the camera follows the rocket from an aerial observation point, using simulated lens-zoom effects to avoid a video-game camera feeling. The close up happens to capture some of the inefficiencies of the design: screws bolting off, rocket stages burning up, and the capsule shaking violently.

When the dog reaches space, she plays in the weightless and wags her tail happily. Through the window she can see the deep blue atmosphere against the blackness of space. She is the first living thing to see the curvature of the Earth. The iconic Sputnik beep doubles as Laika’s excited heartbeat.

Fur and Skin Texture Tests on Laika Model

Slowly and deliberately, the mood changes from the exhilaration of being in space to realization that there is no method for return. The reconcilable Sputnik beep is altered to sound more like an oppressive master. Laika paws with increasing desperation at the window and looks longingly at the Earth below. As the music intensifies, the tiny craft with paper-thin walls is shown hurtling silently through the blackness of space.

Finally, Laika chooses to hold her own leash, so to speak, and end the mission on her own terms by jumping out of her hurtling craft.

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I am very excited to be actively working on a film again after a year-long, school-imposed hiatus. The skills I learn while experimenting in 3D space are just as valuable as those I learn in the classroom, but I had doubts about defining myself in an academic environment without impressive courses.  Now I am convinced that creating a short film is a more effective and enjoyable way of presenting myself – even in an academic environment – than excellency in my classes.