VHP: Virtual Henderson Project
Henderson is a cheesy beefcake of a man. If you haven’t met him yet, he’s a loose-cannon cop with the intelligence of a small soap dish. I’ve been providing his voice for Pendant Productions for a little over 3 years now, and since Season 3 is coming on March 22, I thought something special was in order.
I always wondered what Henderson would look like in real life, and recently, I purchased some new software called “Poser” that can create realistic 3-D human models. Time for a test run!
Virtual Henderson Project: The Process:
The modeling software does have a learning curve to it. This may be less if you’re actually a graphics person or an animator, but for me it was about medium level of difficulty.
After creating the model, the next step is rendering. For still images, it’s not too bad. A few minutes for each one. The animation, however, took a looooonnnnggg time on my computer. Since I wasn’t going to buy a new computer just for this project, I decided to limit the animated portion to 5 seconds. That’s 150 frames (at 30 fps), and each frame took about 4 minutes, so, yeah, long time.
The rest of the video is still shots that I pan up, down, or sideways in the video editing software (I use Sony Vegas).
For the whole project, I’d guess I spent about 30-40 hours.
Bonus! Here’s the blooper reel from Henderson and Havner Season 2:
…and Links to Everything Else Mentioned:
- Henderson Episodes on Joe’s Dump
- Henderson and Havner at Pendant Productions
- Poser 11 Modeling and Animation Software
- Sony Vegas Movie Studio
Enjoy!
Joe
All content written and voiced by Joe J Thomas online at: JoeActor.com