Mario´s Morning "Coffee"

The idea of this animation of Mario trying to enjoy his mug of coffee came from the need of doing something interesting with the Super Mario rigged model that caught my attention a while ago, and this animation, with it´s acting and such was more of an improvised sequence of movements, just to get something out of nothing and turn it, bit by bit, into something more interesting.

But as I gave Mario some movements, I knew he needed an extra Item to hold in his hand, a mug to drink coffee from, he would not drink the air from his hand, would he? So, I decided to model a mug from which he could drink from.

I figured it needed to be a mushroom, since it´s one of the most recurrent items in the Mario franchise, it could have been any other item, but I decided to go with an easy one and model a mushroom shaped mug from scratch.

When making the mushroom mug, I had it easy when modeling the general shape of a mushroom, but there where two very important and hard parts in this process; the hold of the mug, and the way I was gonna place the white big spots on the head of the mushroom.

The cup hold on the side was solved more simply by extruding the spots I wanted to fuse together to create the hold itself, and it was just a matter of bridging with some subdivitions.

For the second problem whoever, it was much more complicated. I wanted the mug to have the signature big white spots on the front, sides and back of the head, but I knew that trying to bend a polygon, sculpt it or rig it to match the curvature of the surface was not gona make it, so I had to use a "decal" technique, where I used a subdivided plane by 4 or 5 times, then place a plane rounded shape along with it, and create a decal effect, so all I had to do at the end was just to stick the decal onto the surface of the mug in order to bend the shape the same way as the rest of the surface, giving it a clean and convincing form.

The Mug

From that point forward, I managed to place the mug on Mario´s hand through locators and some parent constrains.

The Plumber

When animating Mario, I made sure to make him as cartoonish as he has always been in the Nintendo games, and I managed to give him a strong sense of weight and expressión for his performance.

The Plant

The long awaited surpise inside Mario´s coffee mug. The plant is an element fully animated in 2D to give the animation a hybrid look and make it more interesting, seeing a 3D character interact witha 2D animated one is indeed very interesting, and also because I tried to import a Piranha plant 3D rig but it was broken.

The plan itself was fun to animate in Krita, I started by importing the frames into a document and by just drawing the trace of the plant´s head with just a ball near Mario´s hand made the trick to animate the whole thing.

From that point wall that was left to do was to draw the rest of the plant, now with body and leaves into it´s finest and most radical expressions, even when biting Mario´s nose.

And for the final result, I edited the sizes for all formats, for pc and mobile devices.

Mario gets an unexpected suprise! - On Youtube

Character belongs to Nintendo

WIP animation from alternative angle.