In fact I like the little fishy guy so much Im rewriting the script to give him a bigger part (fnar) Ive recorded the voice for the barman - its me of course, squeezed with ee lek tron ik trickery.

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First barman talky bit is done.
(cunning blag#407) My luddite approach to lip-synch goes something like this: You've watched the Muppet show, right. You like Kermit, or Fozzie or Gonzo. Look at them, their mouths have an open state and a close state and that's it. Apart from when Kermit scrunches his gob up on occasion, but you know what I mean. It looks fine as long as the timings right. None of this morph targets for each vowel nonsense.

I have no interest in photorealism, if I did, there wouldn't be an animation of a dog drinking beer and pulling a gun on a shark, would there?

Im more than happy with the my Shark character. So happy in fact Ive decided to re-use the shark model (cunning blag#405b) and use it as the local yocals who try to start a fight with the pup.

Real inbred local types: the big bruiser and the skinny idiot. They're classic archetypes. Yes, they are. See screenshot.

Eye candy

The bar looks a bit drab so Ive decided to add some animated advertising boards on the walls. Ive used Flash to build small animated posters, than output them directly out as AVI's. Then just map the AVI onto a board and Bobs your cross-dressing-aunt. The camera is never going to get THAT close to them, its just eye candy, really.

The bar is finished. Ive added some volumetric lighting to make it look good. (cunning blag#409) The drawback of course is increased rendering times, but at least for the start of the animation I'll use volumetrics a lot. Then cunningly use less and less as the story progresses.

It's a long shot but it just might work…

Okay so the martians gone. He's been replaced by one of my new creations: a pathetic shark with a bad attitude. That's much better. Screenshot available.

I was going to have a martian as the bartender in the bar. No reason why, just that martians featured quite heavily in my previous Sick Puppy short and I missed em.

Having just built a new martian and dropped him into the scene I must say it looks crap. Hmmm….