Toilet Kappa Animation

The term project for my animation and VFX class last semester involved creating a short film between 10-20 seconds with the theme of "Mythical Creature" where the creature makes a sound. The creature I decided to feature in my animation is the kappa (河童), a small Japanese mythical creature. Kappa are clumsy on land and known to play pranks, lurking in water such as rivers, streams, sewers, and bathroom pipes. In modern times, it is sometimes considered a “toilet demon”. 

My final "Toilet Kappa" animation can be viewed on YouTube here:

I decided to go for a more cartoon and cute render of my scene because this is my preferred style and I wanted to do something different from what I had to do for the rest of the semester. The 3D model I selected depicts a cute young kappa wearing its “shell” like a messenger bag on its back. The 3D environment I selected is a washroom scene, which I retextured within Maya to better fit with my cute theme. The links for these models are available in the citations below and are under a Creative Commons attribution license.

I rigged the kappa model from scratch by following Tutorial 05 with some modifications (i.e., hands and feet) and added controls for it in a way that would be suitable for me to animate (see Figure 1 below).

Figure 1. Kappa rigged, painted weights, and added controls

I also created a few blendshapes for the character (see Figure 2 below) for when the kappa makes sounds in the animation. I was planning on doing nCloth animation for the hair, but this proved to add too much to the rendering time.

Figure 2. Kappa blendshapes

I created a storyboard (see Figure 3) to follow when animating and rendering the frames, though some minor changes were made while implementing this. I do not have experience animating characters so this was a difficult learning process as well.

Figure 3. Storyboard

I added dynamic fluids at the end when the kappa jumps into the toilet with a splash (see Figure 4 below) and the camera moves towards an overhead shot of the toilet bowl. I planned on rendering as many frames at the end as possible until the water returns to a still.

Figure 4. Toilet bowl splash

Once I had all my main frames rendered, I imported the image sequence in Premiere and created my own recorded sound effects. I recorded the toilet flushing and splashing with my Android phone, and used my own voice for the kappa sounds and footsteps (recorded with my Blue Yeti microphone). These files were edited and had noise removal performed using Adobe Audition. The animation and audio were composed in the Premiere project file.

Citations:

Mark Bai, “Washroom”, Sketchfab, 20-Dec-2017. [Online]. Available: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/washroom-e22b4bfe83d140f58a2acd420a8b6752. [Accessed: 14-Dec-2020].

yuzutarou, “Kappa”, Sketchfab, 05-Sep-2018. [Online]. Available: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/kappa-8466bead5e624718b3d427b4fd3a6613. [Accessed: 14-Dec-2020].