I began with basic shapes, playing around with a few poses before I explored a few ideas. The flamingo idea was quickly dismissed because I found it boring and liked the idea of pushing the legs into more ridiculous areas.

The cute face/body and muscly legs were one of the more ridiculous ideas but my favourite. It lead to my final idea because I decided i want to keep that big contrast between the body and legs. I decided wanted the final idea to be creepy and slightly off putting.

I did, however, arrive pretty early on to my final idea.

I was happy with this design very early on. I decided to personify a ball of dust. Sticking with the idea of contrast I wanted I planned his body to be a ball of hair with large, bulging eyes while his legs would be exaggerated and pasty human legs. Also including large, exaggerated feet.

I played around a lot with the idea of how he would move. I imagined quite feral, gross movements. Such as the above sketch where it’s like a flea-ridden dog scratching their ear. This was before I realised the rig we’d be using would mean the legs would move in a very human way.

After deciding this was a ‘dust ball’ I decided a good idea for the final film would be the creature being chased my vacuum across a room! Above are rough thumbnails of ideas for the creature’s erratic movements.

I wanted them to be a little uncomfortable for the viewer — almost insect like given they’re so spindly and he’ll be moving fast. It was much easier to get this sense of movement in the initial sketches as opposed to the finished product.

For the set I decided a living room would work best. It could be a pretty simple space to have the creature run around. I began drawing from reference images for ideas before deciding it would be better to come up with a few basic obstacle for the creature to get through before it would be out in the open and caught by the hoover.

The bottom image was my final layout for the room and has a small dotted trail for the dust creature’s planned route. I decided to keep it fairly simply as the film only needed too be short. In the end, I’m very happy with the location design.

The vacuum won’t be as personified as the dust creature. I decided to base the design on a Henry hoover. As the film would be at the dust creature’s eye level, I thought exaggerating the overly happy face of a Henry hoover with an extremely low angle would like horrifying — just as a vacuum would look to a ball of dust.

At first I considered making the face look angrier but after more exploration decided an overly happy huge grin had the much more unsettling effect I was aiming for.

I’m proud of the actual model for the creature. It was as close to my drawn design as I think I would have been able to reach given how new Maya was too me. One big problem I faced, though, was getting the hair right. I’d tried a few plug-ins and uses Maya’s preset fur. However, I seemed to be having trouble with the splines generating. When they did work all of the hair would be bunched around the eyes. Eventually, I had to look for other means to make the hair.

I found a tutorial on youtube where they used simple leaf shaped polygons with a basic painted texture to make blocky, stylised hair. I liked the look of it and thought it would actually end up suiting my film better as everything is very low poly and has very little detail. Hyper realistic hair may of looked out of place (or improved the animation as whole).

Either way, I used two different painted textures and assigned the textures at random so that the hair wouldn’t look too uniform.

While this method was simplest and easiest it did mean I couldn’t have the hair interact at all with hoover. Instead, it hangs from solidly off the creatures head.

Over all, I’m not too happy with his texture either. I noticed too late there were some slips in the UV’s and whilst it isn’t immediately noticeable in the play blast with a higher resolution render it would’ve been plain to see.

I really enjoyed modelling all the separate objects for the scene. The book, especially, was a favourite of mine. While it’s not very complicated I am very proud of the model itself. And had some texturing it. I created the book in three separate parts. While I had planned for the book to be moved in the animation my imagination exceeded my animation ability.

Another object I’m proud of is the sofa. Again I’d made the base of the sofa and then all the pillows separately. I hadn’t planned out how I wanted to texture everything and in the end went with the same wooden texture as the floor for the sofa legs and a flat , coloured lambert for the fabric.

I did not leave myself enough time make a rendered version of the animation (something I’ll know how much time to plan for next year). I played around with very simple lighting. Mostly I used an ambient light that gave everything a nice, almost pastel-y look to it. If I had managed to render out the piece it would have looked like the screen grab below.