- Mighty Giant: Chester Zoo's 'Wild Worlds' Campaign -
Above: The result of the sculpture that I re-created and animated.
Brief
I worked with Mighty Giant to bring a couple of paper sculptures to life, as part of a campaign for Chester Zoo. The plan was to accurately recreate the sculptures within C4D (3D software), and then animate them.
I had the pleasure of overseeing the 3D production pipeline, as well as recreating and animating one of the sculptures myself. This post will be focussing on the piece I worked on.
The Approach
I began the recreation by paying attention to how the sculptures were built and shot.
I was supplied with some basic (yet vital) information about the scene: roughly where the lights were, and the distance between each layer of the sculpture. This allowed me to establish the foundations of the scene. I was also supplied with individual images for most of the assets.
Modelling and Texturing
I built each layer one-by-one with the use of splines and extrude generators, using photos and measurements as reference.
I then built and textured the assets with the use of the reference imagery. Some were created by simply tracing over the imagery with splines and extruding them, and others required 3D geometry to be modelled from primitives. Most of the assets were textured with the reference imagery, with the rest being recreated.
Some of the assets required a bit of deformation. For these, I used deformers, which would later be used to drive some of the animation.
Once everything was in place, I did some final tweaks to the positioning of the assets and lighting to match the photo of the original sculpture, then moved onto animating.
Animating
The camera is meant to trigger the animations of the assets once it's near them. So, naturally, the camera was animated first. Once the camera moves had been approved, the rest of the assets could be animated in sync with the camera move.
'Bend' deformers (which most assets were already utilising) and basic position/rotation animations were used for the most part. A couple of assets used animated PNG sequences (i.e. the swinging monkey and jaguar), which were provided by our team's 2D illustrator/animator.
Rendering
The final piece was rendered using Octane.
More Information
Additional info about this project can be found here:
- https://mightygiant.co.uk/work/chester-zoo/
- https://mightygiant.co.uk/work/chester-zoo/
