StoryBots : Dink & Doink

V-Ray V-Ray Common Gallery
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Back in 2020 I was approached by Evan Spiridellis, one of the co-creators of The StoryBots, who asked if I would like to help out on their new series, StoryBots : Answer Time. For those not in the know, StoryBots is a fantastic kids’ show on Netflix and it’s a BIG hit with everyone in our household.

I leapt at the chance and ended up working on a series of short films featuring two new bickering bot characters, Dink and Doink.

Only AFTER I started working on the project did Evan reveal who would be voicing the two characters… Dave Goelz and Frank Oz! Again, for anyone not in the know both are absolute legends and personal heroes of mine. Dave is the original creator and performer of Gonzo the Great and a whole host of other Muppets/Fraggles. Frank is not only an amazing director (Dark Crystal, Little Shop of Horrors, Death at a Funeral to name a few) but performs Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Grover, Cookie Monster, Bert, Animal and Yoda(!).

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Animating characters is tough but when the people voicing them are world class puppeteers in their own right, it’s terrifying (in the best way!)

The original plan was for me to design, animate and render 5 x 2 minute shorts with these two characters (and a surprise creature) BUT it quickly transpired that it would take way too much time, so this first short is the only one that I fully designed, animated and rendered on my own. It’s a little rough around the edges, partly because 1.5 mins of character animation with NO cuts is a tough gig (more than I appreciated!) but mainly down to my own limited animation skills.

The remaining shorts/creatures were designed, modelled, lit and textured by me, with an incredible animator called Lauren Hammond taking over the important work of actually making them come to life and render wrangling falling to Robert Showalter.

I will share some BTS shots and info on the other shorts later.

Everything is 3ds Max and rendered in V-Ray. I also used tyFlow for a whole bunch of incredible time saving magic and Kinematiclab’s fantastic OverMorpher plugin.

Anyway, here is a clip of the first Dink and Doink outing!​

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Awesome! You found yourself a nice niche.

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That’s cool. You’re lucky to be able to get these fantastic gigs
but of course you seem the natural choice for them.

I’m in the middle of something right now which involves an animated communicating old oak tree, plus a talking and animated robin and 2 mech alien bird things.
We’ll see how that turns out and I’ll post it when it’s ready…if it is any good that is

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As I mentioned in the first post, the original plan was that I would tackle the whole production for all 5 shorts on my own. After the first short, it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t going to be feasible in the time we had. So for the remaining for, I designed, modelled, textured and lit the characters, props and the environments, but then handed the assets over to an incredibly talented animator called Lauren Hammond, who rigged and animated the characters in Maya. Once animation was locked, I worked with Robert Showalter to export my V-Ray settings from 3ds Max to Maya. This involved exporting a .vrscene and a render with a bunch of render elements so he could compare and contrast. All in all I think it worked out really well! The animation Lauren did is leagues ahead of my own skills and while I was initially nervous about having someone else animate characters I’d created, it was actually a real treat!

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Brilliant of course, though I just noticed some facetting on the walrus’s paw ends…sorry :stuck_out_tongue:
We can blame the sss shader I think, as I seem to recall that that’s still a bit of an issue in some cases :slight_smile:

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Ha! Like I said, these were for approval of the overall scene, lighting and character, most of the issues like that were fixed in the final animations :slight_smile:

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Ah ok…phew! :slight_smile: