The Making of the Quints
by Eric Stone

When the production for the DAVE School film Spoonman first began, I knew right away that I wanted to do the modeling for the “Quints” and approached writer/director William Vaughan to undertake the job. In the film, these robotic chicks do the dirty work of their boss and engage in battle with the main character, Ino. The basic idea was to create a base Quint and build five full characters from it to form the team. Quite a bit of thought and time went into these characters and with the positive feedback we have received from the online community, I believe they turned out very well.

The basic concept of the Quints was to create a team of robots that still had feminine qualities, but still looked like they could do some damage. With many different reference images to use for guidance I used great concept art from Chris Dozier, Fred Hooper, and Kazunori Suga. From their work, working with the director, we pulled different pieces of each, and I created a complete robot. With other resources like “Battle Angel” and Appleseed, I kept with the theme of traditional Anime with big eyes, a small mouth, and girlish attributes.

Actually modeling the base Quint was a tedious process. I did not model her in the traditional way where she would be one piece. The only true organic piece of the model is the bodice. This gave the Quints their humanistic quality and is the only place for deformation. Since we were using Lightwave’s default Cel Shader, it was important to achieve almost perfect polyflow in order to get clean lines and Anime-style shadows. After the bust was completed, I literally built the rest of the body piece by piece. Since she is a robot, I needed to create an effective joint system for the shoulders, knees, and hip areas to give the illusion of working mechanics.

After the base body was modeled I could add details like plating, vents, and holes to give her the robotic feel we were trying to achieve. For the plating, I copied certain polygons and used VertiBevel to build dimension and then intersected each piece to the core body part. The bridge tool was a lifesaver and was used to create the many holes and “vents” throughout the Quint. Overall, the base was kept pretty simple, but was just dressed up to look more complex. The abdomen contains numerous “Nernies and greebles” like wires, plating, and an “energy cell” that completed the whole package. With an added nut and bolt here and some wires there, you have an instant robo-chick.

As soon as the base Quint was finalized, she needed to be turned into five different characters to start animation. Quint 1 and 2 are basically the same character with minor differences, so I went ahead and created the clothing and hair for them. Quints 3, 4, and 5 were split up between Freddy Oropeza, Eanuel Rosario Diaz, and Nick Floyd. Each had a little freedom on giving their Quint a different personality, and used different modeling techniques. The look of Quint 1 and 2 were decided upon early in production, which made created their clothing quick. The dresses were created from existing geometry to get already existing shapes, from which I used the Extender Plus tool in LightWave [8] to model the front and back flaps. The hair was formed from a “strand” that was copied and pasted with changes to its shape. Therefore each piece was a separated object and could be surfaced to create highlights. The braids were modeled from William Vaughan’s technique of creating a spline, using rail extend, and then repeated to create three separate strands. (ftp://ftp.newtek.com/pub/LightWave/Tutorials/Vidz/braids.mov) With other details like the Japanese-style shoes, arm cuffs, and hair sacs, Quint 1 and 2 were complete with minor changes to the hair to give each a different look.

Since we used the defualt Cel Shade shader for all of the characters in Spoonman, texturing was kept minimal. For all the Quints, a different image was used on a UV map for the irises to give each their own eye color. On Quint 1 and 2, there was a UV Map created for the front and back of their dresses where the artwork of my classmate, Chin Chao Chin was placed. The final touch was another UV Map on each of their cheeks to place the number of which Quint they are.

The hand-drawn look of each of the characters was achieved with Lightwave’s Cel Shader and rendering with edges. Surfacing the Quints was a feat in itself. When rendering with edges, Lightwave will place a black line around outer edges of geometry with different surface names. Therefore, since all of the Quints had a uniform metallic look about them, I still had to name very plate, dent, and shadow a different surface to ensure that edges would be created to give the inked look. Once the metal texture was achieved, it was just copied and pasted to all other surfaces.

In Spoonman, we rendered each scene in different passes, since the characters had to be lit differently than the environments. With Cel Shade, one distant light set to 100% gives great results. Though, placement of this light is essential. To avoid harsh shadows but get good highlights takes a little trial and error. We then composited the character pass with the environment pass to complete each shot.

With the way that the base Quint was built, rigging was a rather simple task. Since each body part was basically its own separate object, chunks of the body where weighted and assigned to their designated bone. The neck was the only area where I applied a weight gradient to help with deformation between the torso and head. After the base Quint was rigged, additional bones were created depending on each Quint rig. For Quints 3 and 4, bones were needed to animate their skirts, and 1 and 2 had bone chains applied to their braids and dress flaps. Animation became tedious with this many additional bones, but proved effective and looks great. For the feet I used the reverse foot rig to give to maximum amount of mobility and ease of animation. You can find a tutorial on this in , HDRI (“I still have my feet on the ground…” Jan/Feb 2005, pgs. 76-81, written by William Vaughan) (http://www.hdri3d.com). For Quint 1 and 2 though, I weighted the heel and footpad bone to the sandal, so that the foot could separate from the shoe. It adds a nice detail to the film and quality of animation. Quints 3, 4, and 5 only needed FK rigs for their arms, but I had to create an IK arm rig for 1 and 2 since they fight with swords and it made animation easier to control.

As for the face morphing of the Quints, we were not too concerned with creating a full phoneme set for the mouth, since the Anime style of talking requires minimal mouth changes. Therefore, all that was needed was a mouth open and close, and mood morphs like angry and anguish. After a set of eyebrow and eye morphs were created, the Quints were ready for animation.

Be sure to check out the film here: www.daveschool.com/spoonman

About Eric Stone:
Born and raised in Houston, Texas, I graduated from Texas Sate University of San Marcos with a degree in Communication Design. I was not particularly interested in the graphic/advertising industry, and have always wanted to go into computer animation, so I moved to Orlando, Florida and now attend the DAVE School, where I am learning everything about Lightwave, and soon Maya. I still have a passion for art and draw in my free time (whenever I find some). I have quickly found that I enjoy modeling and animation and would like to pursue a career in either field.