When making my reel for this year I wanted to do more than just make clean cuts between projects in time with upbeat trendy music. My solution was to make an eye catch and engaging introduction short for my reel that also served the purpose of showing off my talents as a digital media designer. This idea had been floating around in my head for around a month or so before I acted upon it. I started pulling together inspiration for how I wanted the visual feel of the animation to have. The movie TRON: Legacy was a very big inspiration for the design of the animation.
I loved the movie when it came out and the clean futuristic and modern design style that was displayed throughout the design of the movie had always been the thing I remembered most about the film. I decided to take the clean minimalist look and apply it to the bulk of my designs concepts. Even from the start I knew this project was going to be very complicated and require a lot of thought before I even started designing in Cinema 4D. I started sketching out the ideas I had come up with from looking at inspiration and different aspects that I pulled from my own imagination.
The modeling, texturing, animation, and rendering for this project in total took just a little over a month. I used my sketches shown above to help me have a game plan while making the different models. The sketches were pretty loose so most of the detail came while I was modeling. I built the scene starting with the hall way and then building out into the main room, starting with larger box shapes to fill space, then adding the detailed models as I created them. Most of the modeling was done with a mix between Adobe Illustrator files being extruded to make the shapes, and complete hard surface modeling inside Cinema 4D.
After all the models were made and animated, I went ahead and started texturing everything, which went much faster with the use of Octanes Live Viewer. I then went through and added dirt and scratches to the areas I wanted to be more worn down, using Octanes dirt tag. Not only did I apply this to the metal textures, I also was able to use it on the light textures to allow a more natural fall off at the edges of some of the lights. The way that Octane textures produce light with blackbody emissions is one of my main reasons for using it to render out this project. The blackbody emission illumination had the exact right feel that I had been picturing since the start. The added speed in renders was also a very big component as well. Bellow are the breakdowns of some of the scenes from wire frame to final render.
Thank you for watching!
