If you’ve been reading along, you might have noticed something. The Collemarmo post talked about Sandro, Bruno and the Emporio, but none of the pictures showed who was behind the counters.
That’s because, until recently, they were placeholders. A badger in a headscarf here, a rough bear there. Fine for testing, and not a lot of charm. Matteo has had company in town for a while, but now it actually looks like it.
Mastro Sandro
Sandro runs the stone yard at Il Poggio, and he’s a rhino, which felt right for someone who spends all day shifting marble around. He’s big, a bit gruff, and very proud of his stone. He never comes down to the studio. His world is the yard, his little whitewashed hut and his desk, so his animations are all about the sale: greeting you, presenting a block, accepting your money, and the occasional polite no.
Bruno
Bruno is the smith, and he’s a bison. A big one, about 1.85 metres, with a leather apron and forearms like hams. He’s the one who’s too busy for you early on and slowly comes round as you earn your stripes. He has his own blacksmith bits too: hammering at the anvil and pumping the bellows.
Signora Bettina
Bettina keeps the Emporio. She used to be the badger. She’s now a raven, she’s kept her name, and she’s easily the most fiddly character we’ve done. Her wings fold against her back, with a bit of spring so they settle when she moves rather than staying rigid. Her full skirt swings as she walks without passing through her legs, which took longer than anyone wants to talk about. When she’s idle she preens her neck feathers or leafs through her ledger.
How a character gets finished
Each of them goes through the same steps Matteo did. Proper eyes with lids. A mouth that opens (or a beak, in Bettina’s case). Teeth and a tongue. Then a full rig for the face and body. To save time they share a base set of animations, but each one then gets adjusted to fit their shape and given a few moves of their own, because a rhino and a raven really shouldn’t stand the same way.
To keep all of that under control we built a little review room. Each animation plays on a loop in an empty test scene with a camera you can orbit around, and it gets either signed off or sent back with notes. The next round only shows the ones that were sent back. It sounds dry, but it catches the things you’d never spot in passing, like a hand drifting through an apron or an ear clipping a collar for a couple of frames.
There are still fixes going in for all three, but they’re in, and the town finally feels lived in. Next post: the tutorial, and some news.