Tobi The Cat - 3D Animation
This project is one of my first 3D animations. I worked with Darius Rudoi to create a whimsical and heartwarming story. Although I would consider myself fairly green to 3D Animation, it is one of my favorite mediums to work with due to its amount of versatility.
A big inspiration for the initial idea for this project was Garfield and this was nodded at with the color scheme of the title card. In particular I really liked the idea of a well meaning pet who unintentionally creates havoc for their loving owner. After initially thinking of the scene of the cat unintentionally dropping the vase, Darius and I thought of two more scenarios that could be misconstrued to create the rest of the plot of the animation around.
To complete this project Darius and I had three key stages in development. The first stage was the storyboarding and animatic stage. In this stage, Darius and I created the story and main plot points. Afterwards we moved on to Maya where we worked on the rough modeling and animation stage. During this time we had very simple models and animations to get a better idea of the pacing and how the scene would look like. After we finished that, we moved on to the polish stage. During this stage Darius and I incorporated finished models, textures, lighting, as well as more refined animations.
For this project Darius and I split the work up to best suit our strengths. For example Darius has a lot of experience modelling so he worked on creating all of the models, except for the human and the cat characters. Darius also completed all of the lighting for all of the scenes. I worked on creating all the animations, which was a lot of great practice and a good learning opportunity. After the animation was rendered, I took all of the scenes into After Effects to complete all of the post production including editing, adding sound and music, and compositing.
Ultimately, both Darius and I were both very happy with our completed project as we were able to see our vision through to the end.
