On animation: From eew to aww. Part 1 - Dust bunnies are going to need a makeover

That simple sketch is how a dust bunny first manifested in my imagination - as an as-yet-still-insignificant ball of blue hat fluff, blue as the sky outside, cast adrift into mid-air and the arms of gravity.
My friend John kindly sketched the same scene up for me.

However real dust bunnies are scruffy oiks. Look at them, poorly groomed and coarsely entangled.

It’s going to take some radical character development to glam them up for the big screen.
There's a lot to consider; what will dust bunnies look like- their texture, their colours, their degree of scruffiness and all those wayward threads.
How will they move around the house? The Wind will tell us that though. On animation: The dance of the dust bunnies
But the big question is how to incorporate their emotional expressions - physically they can wave their thready arms easily enough but they'll need a face of sorts.
The Lego movies had a clever solution for that, they just animated the mini-figs painted faces.
It's probably possible to create photorealistic facial expressions for the dust bunnies using motion capture but that incurs personhours and computational expenses, another factor to consider.
We take many of our communication cues from eyes so that'll be the tricky bit for the character designers. Not my job though so tra la la la, let's press on.

The writer gets his big crayons out

Here’s some early character studies I did - much as Leonardo Da Vinci did for his subjects. In art circles this is technically known as scribbling but it’s an attempt to capture the random, ungroomed anatomy of a dust bunny’s entangled threads and fibres. Got the colour for Rayon though, needs to be blue so blue he is.

But many and various are the dust bunnies Rayon encounters. Knickers is the first domestic dust bunny he meets, the Queen of the dust bunnies. They collide in a static electrical clinch.

She gave up struggling against Rayon’s persistent clinging. ‘Knickers.’
‘Well, I’m not too pleased about this myself.’
‘No. Me, you fuzzball. Knickers.’
‘Is a name?’ tried Rayon.
‘Correct. Gusset stitching, pearlescent lacey trim and elastic. You?’
‘Rayon. Ex-hat. Treated cellulose. Recently entangled. Pleased to meet you.’

Knickers takes Rayon to the dim gloom under the bed where she introduces Rayon to the Biddies, entangled as they are from a bit o' this and bit o' that. Biddies are drab on the outside and drab on the inside. "They're dreadful materialists." explains Knickers.

Meet Yarn from the attic. He's got an interesting story to tell Rayon

2D or not 2D? The great leap sideways

Earlier in this blog I questioned whether contemporary animation needs to be so startlingly photo-realistic. 

So Rayon and the dust bunnies could be animated by ye olde-fashioned cel animation. I wonder what Rayon would think of that?

But yes, Rayon will probably look real as real can be, all photorealistically astonishing. I do like this impromptu blendo of of photo and graphic styles though.
But before we start throwing the logs into the boilers to spark up the
supercomputer rendering farm, let's take a look at the poor man's 3D
next - discount store dust bunnies.