MOREDEMO REEL BREAKDOWN & PRODUCTION STILLS
This breakdown scheme will feature stills of each section followed by a brief description of the project it came from and some production stills and/or movies.
CLICK ON A THUMBNAIL TO JUMP TO ITS SECTION:
TOTEM
Totem was an experiment with animating transformations. I started out using parented nulls as pivot points for smaller nested objects to emerge from. I tried out a bunch of different moves and decided this would be great to use for a character. Here’s my prototype video for the animation principle:
I did some 2D animation for the face as well, it’s subtle but if you watch the eyes you’ll see it. I mapped the 2D video for the face, it wasn’t very linear but for the small clip it worked fine. I get lots of good feedback on this piece, it’s crazy how simple it was to do. This section took about 6 hours start to finish, it was done in Cinema4D.
BUGS
This animation was part of a project for school. It was an investigation into the scientific cataloging of earth’s species. I used MoGraph to drive the bugs and the tracer. It also allowed me to track the numbers in the 3D environment instead of comping them in later, this gives the letters depth as they move in and out instead of static scales in a composit.
I did this project in one night, it took about 14 hours start to finish. The final piece was 53 seconds long. The final piece was made using Cinema4D and After Effects. The bit used in the reel was just the video from cinema.
GLOBIE
Globie was a simple character rig that I made to put in a project that never came to fruition. The rig is built using morphs with XPRESSO to make a table of sliders to control the facial expressions. The design is based on the style of graphics used for kids television. Globie was originally intended to be used in a satirical sketch with the character smoking cigarettes and puking toxic waste, that sort of thing but I never went any further with it. Who knows, maybe someday it’ll get used for something. Here’s a capture of the interface I built to animate it with:
Globie took about an 5 hours to model, texture, rig and program. It was done in Cinema4D.
MAC CLASSIC
The Macintosh Classic is an iconic image to be sure. For me it screams old, beige computers from another time, and this scene was designed to be used for presentation purposes. To mix some newer content, like titles or animations, with old school computers. I’m not even sure this thing had a colour screen, but it’s definitely a nice contrast to see some punchy graphics on such an old model. This was a fun model to build because I couldn’t actually get my hands on one, so it was done all from pictures. The trick here was using lots of AO to give it the grimy look of aged plastic. I think my dad had one of these when I was a kid, those were the days….
This scene took about 6 hours start to finish. Also done in Cinema4D
GLOWING POUR
Ahh fluid dynamics. This was originally a prototype for some clothing company which I don’t think even exists anymore. The job fell through, but the sim was fine for some GI lighting experiments in Cinema. This was keyframed colour changes in the luminescence of the texture with a composting tag so the actual mesh would ignore its own GI. Simple stuff, nice effect.
This project probably took about 12 hours, not counting the sims. It was done in Cinema4D and RealFlow.
SHERMAN
Sherman is one of those characters that’s slowly developed over a long time. Originally it was hairless, and a sea creature. Now I’m not really sure what it is, it’s a sort of an amalgam of a few characters. I was playing with hair a lot when I came across my old files for this character. I did some fun experiments with hair, here’s one of them:
All in, this project probably took about 16 Hours. Again it was done in Cinema4D.
PAPERWOLF & PINWHEELS
Paperwolf & Pinwheels is a big bad 2.5D scene done in Cinema4D. While researching 2.5D I saw that most people stick to AE for adding the Z space to their animations, but I wanted to go into a full 3D package and see if I couldn’t have a bit more fun. It was way easier in cinema, each object is a node in a set of cloners with either XPRESSO or effectors driving its movement. With a few effectors to randomize the positions and rotations of the pinwheels I got lots of variety with no real tweaking. The scene was done with no major keyframes to speak of, everything was done with XPRESSO and by animating the effectors. The wolf was animated in Flash and then moved into Cinema and After Effects for the comp. This was a really fun scene to build, lots of problems to solve.
I would say all in this took about 20 hours start to finish. Done in Cinema4D, After Effects and Flash
FAT GROW & BLOODFLOW
Fat Grow & Bloodflow was a really fun project to dig in to. The first segment was an attempt at simulating the sci-fi style microscopic virus that we’ve all seen a million times in movies. I had a lot of trouble setting the timing for the grow sequence. After some quick zooms we see the blood cells, now this scene was shaded entirely using procedural textures. It’s a series of noise, turbulence, and gradients with lots of mixing and channel switching. I used plenty of displacement and bump to give the detail to the surfaces. Tinted depth of field gives a nice limit to our view, and there’s a subtle pulsing to the walls of the vein. Here are a few of my production stills:
This project had a lot of tweaking and waiting for results, so it took about 15 hours for the grow and another 20 for the bloodflow. 35 hours in total. Done in Cinema4D.
GRIMES
Grimes is without question the most labor intensive project I’ve undertaken. Full IK rigging with morphs for the face, as well as a pretty high-detail model of my old cellphone. This started a few years ago, Grimes was one of the first characters I designed, and about a year later I decided to rig it fully. The rigging process was intense, I’d say that once the model was built I probably put 40 hours into the rig. When that was done I started a short with grimes and a cellphone model I made. I posed and animated about 80% of the scenes in my storyboard, maybe when I’ve got some time I’ll finish it. The final animation involved lots of dynamics, I tried to do real simulations whenever possible in RealFlow (when I did this project Cinema’s dynamics weren’t up to snuff). The grimes rig has full range of motion, with really acceptable limits. There are 90 bones in the rig and 140 nulls & controllers. There’s also plenty of XPRESSO and MOCCA. The face and hands are controlled by 50 user data sliders programmed in XPRESSO. I did the walk cycle with non-linear animation (NLA) which ended up being a huge time saver once I figured out the proper velocity to move the model along its path. NLA is great because it’s scalable, it saves having to fumble around with keyframe interpolations. I needed a break from this project around the 60 hour mark. Maybe one day I’ll take it back up and finish it off. Still to be done are the final scenes, post, audio, editing, and titles.
So this project took over 60 hours, I really lost count, could be closer to 70. Everything was done in Cinema4D, except for a few dynamics simulations in RealFlow.
WATER
“Water” is a fluid simulation, with a little dancing water tagged onto the end. Sims were done in Realflow, and it was rendered in Cinema. The particle system had 110,000 particles, so it’s rather nice detail considering the low count. This project took off when a teacher asked for a project including simple particle systems, I decided to take it a bit further. I did lots of tweaking with the viscosity and int/ext pressures to get the water flowing right. Also lots of daemons to control the movement in the second half. Here’s the straight mesh rendered out:
I made this scene over a weekend, it took about 30 hours.
OCAD BUILD
I made the OCAD model when I was working on the OCAD design competition. We were designing a wayfinding system and needed full 3D maps of the school. Eventually I decided it would be nice to animate building the model using booleans. The whole model has 275,000 polygons so calculations took for ever, but it worked out well. The only problems I had were the GI settings for the lighting. For most of the lighting I used the illumination from an HDRI and my settings were too low to stay consistent, so I got some major artifacting on the shadows. If I had the time (and a few more computers in my farm) I would re-render the scene with higher GI settings.
Including breaking the blueprints we found online, this scene took 40 hours to complete (mind you it’s full to scale within about 50cm of every level of the school, with windows). It was done in Cinema, with lots of vector work in Illustrator.
LETTER CRASH
I ended the reel with more of my name, that’s what I’m trying to sell here. Sometimes titles can be boring to watch and to animate, so I did some cloth dynamics with bright colours. I used big ugly polygons in the model so that it wouldn’t fold so much and would have more rigidity. Once the letters fell and slid down the plane I pumped some wind into the scene which made the pieces fly away, looking a bit like birds. This was a fun little scene to put together.
This scene took 3 hours to get just right. Done in Cinema4D.
Well that’s how the reel breaks down. If you’ve got any questions put them in the comment box and I’ll do my best to explain.
Great selection of topics. Keep up the good work.
A lot of fun stuff there.
I enjoyed the entire show.