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.