I'm absolutely thrilled to share an animation side-project I recently completed with a small team of exceptionally talented friends. For about three and a half years, we dedicated our nights and weekends to creating this super creepy and fun-filled world. During a stormy night in Camp Heebie Jeebie, the ghost stories shared by a group of Jeebie Scouts become all too real. Enjoy!
I was responsible for the 3D look development, title design, texturing, lighting, VFX, compositing, and pipeline development. I also handled a lot of the modeling. This project provided an amazing opportunity for my friends and I to improve our various skill sets.
Behind the Scenes:
Some of Dylan's concept artwork and 2D animation below:
Some work in progress renders from production:
Our friend Jasper did an awesome job modeling the moon monster for us!
Maya was our primary 3D tool for this project. It was used for most modeling tasks, layout, animation, lighting, and rendering via Redshift.
Substance Painter made it possible to get through the tremendous amount of texturing work that needed to be done. I had never used it before this project and now I can't imagine working without it!
I developed a tool that builds shading networks in Maya from the textures generated in Substance Painter. Doing so drastically reduced the time needed to setup materials.
Cinema 4D was used for title design, visual effects (lightning, smoke, clouds, fracturing), and some procedural modeling tasks.
Renders from Maya typically contained about 50 AOVs. Compositing was done in Nuke.
We used DaVinci Resolve for the final conform, color grade, and output. I especially appreciated the fact that it could handle playing back EXR files in realtime.
Render times typically averaged about 12 minutes per frame. Most of the time we only had one computer to render with. A number of techniques were used to reduce render times including the use of Redshift proxies, trace sets, visibility flags, and limiting trace depth. Motion blur was generally calculated in comp. I wrote custom submission scripts for Deadline, which was used to manage all of the rendering.
I also wrote some scripts for Maya and Nuke that allowed them to communicate with Shotgun, which was used to track our progress.
Thanks for watching!
