The fact that today, most seeds that grow our food are bred by agrochemical companies to be chemically dependent is totally @#$%’d up. To try and shed some light on an alternative method of growing our food stuffs, we partnered with our new friends The Butler Bros and the Clif Bar Family Foundation to create Mr. Seed, a foul mouthed, organic seed evangelist that is equal parts cute and dirty. Please visit www.seedmatters.org for more info. Directed by Buck For full credits visit buck.tv

Seed Matters

Character TD
Rigging TD
R&D

This was a fun and challenging project, It was also one of my first big projects at BUCK. We were 3 riggers in total, and some of my main tasks were to polish and give maintenance to the character, outfit and prop rigs. I also had to build specific solutions for the rigs and tools for technical animation and assist other departments. We didn't use motion blur on this spot because of the stopmotion aesthetic, that means we had to pay more attention to the deformations and be very careful with texture stretching on patterns and closeups.

Mr Seed

We put special care in the range of motion on the face and we passed multiple iterations until we got the right behavior. Feet were also very particular.

Key Rig Features:

Dynamic Sprout.
4 Different outfits (Base, Gym, Robe and Sweater)
Automatic noise deformation on the cloth
Wide range of motion for the face countering the texture stretching.
Multiple set of arms for smear frames

Dynamic Spline Rig

Scripted solution, it needed to be populated to all the characters
Animators are able to deform the input attract curve with the FK controls
Extra row of controls to tweak the shape if necessary
Lightweight, we didn’t want to slow down the character rigs
FK, IK, and Dynamic modes
It needed to run in twos

The best result was with a weight value around 0.75.

Avoiding Texture Stretching

Below you can see how the stretching was minimized by deforming the UVs in the mouth narrow shapes.

Stretching attribute at 0.0

Stretching attribute at 1.0

Auto Noise

Animation needed to feel like stop-motion, I added a layer of random transformations to the fabric to create the effect of a human hand touching the characters between frames. All the evaluations are done in twos (12fps).

This added imperfections and asymmetry to all the outfits, also the animator had the flexibility to tweak the multiplier or turn it off completely.

Mrs. Seed

Mrs. Seed rig was very similar as Mr. Seed we reused as much as possible, we actually used Mr. Seed’s rig as a stand in for most of the production and replaced it later.

GMOs

There were multiple variations for this character sharing the same rig (one for woman and one for man). We had to add a layer on top for fixes and modifications to the meshes trough blendshapes. We wanted to have a wide range of variations and asymmetry while keeping the appeal and the expressive deformations on the face.

Props

This kind of props are always a challenge, we not only have to build some unique solutions for each prop but we also had a lot of assets.
Here are some of the props that I have the most fun working with.

CREDITS

Directed by BUCK
Executive Creative Director: Ryan Honey
Executive Producer: Maurie Enochson
Creative Director: Joe Mullen
Head of CG: Doug Wilkinson
Producer: Emily Rickard
Production Coordinator: Kaitlyn Mahoney
Animation Director: Alessandro Ceglia
CG Lead: Alex Dingfelder
Art Director: Laura Yilmaz
Editor: Alessandro Ceglia
3D Animation: Alessandro Ceglia, Tyler Lancaster, Dony Permedi, Adam Floeck
Modeling: Eric Pagtaconan, Wing Sze Lee, Michele Herrera, John Niehuss, Mingoo Park, Jens Lindgren, Eyad Hussein, Alex Dingfelder, Arvid Volz, Brice Linane, Rie Ito
Look Development Lead: Alex Dingfelder
Look Development: Wing Sze Lee, Eric Pagtaconan, Michele Herrera, Jens Lindgren, John Niehuss, Mingoo Park
Rigging TD: Ernesto Ruiz Velasco
Character TD: Eyad Hussein, Ernesto Ruiz Velasco
Pipeline and FX TD: Albert Omoss
Additional Rigging: Lee Wolland
Lighting Direction: Alex Dingfelder
Lighting: Wing Sze Lee, Jens Lindgren, Alex Dingfelder, Eric Pagtaconan, Michele Herrera
Compositing Lead: Alex Dingfelder
Compositing: Alex Dingfelder, Wing Sze Lee
Storyboards: Laura Yilmaz, Kendra Ryan, Alessandro Ceglia, Craig Yamamoto
Concept Art and Matte Painting: Laura Yilmaz, Scott Huntsman, Susan Yung, Audrey Yeo
Design: Laura Yilmaz, Joe Mullen, Susan Yung, Scott Huntsman, Audrey Lee, Rasmus Bak, Xoana Herrera, Vincent Tsui, Jenny Ko, Kenesha Sneed
Music and Sound Design: Antfood
Voice of Mr Seed: Pete Holmes