Second installment of my Ambient Animations. This time I went with more abstract themes, square image format and a bit more unorthodox workflow for producing them. Keep scrolling for full story and breakdown (image heavy, lots of gifs)
Initial inspiration for this project came from watching certain 2D artists/illustrators work, especially ones that specialize on environments. I loved how they jot down large blobs with brush, or carve shapes with lasso tool. Then fill them with a color, gradient or some pattern and voila— buildings, mountains, rivers and cars emerged from canvas.
This is very different from traditional 3D workflow, where you often need to have objects modeled/UV-d/textured and more or less fully resolved before you start arranging them in a scene and final composition starts coming together.
With this project, I wanted to bring those two worlds closer together and combine intuitive and illustrative approach of 2D world with reusability of assets and procedural approaches 3D software provides.
At first I faced some problems— since I’ve been working on game art during last years where each asset is up for close inspection, my instincts had me cleaning up and optimizing models, or trying to UV and texture them properly. This has served me well in the past, but this project was not about that.
Solution was to lock down camera framing / view and evaluate objects exclusively from that angle. Everything that was not facing camera or was outside bounds, I could freely discard. This immediately narrowed down my circle of concern and sped up process significantly. I started building up images, not 3D scenes.
Here are some shots of scenes viewed from external camera. As you can see, even sky is just a plane with texture. There are also some arbitrary objects used as shadow casters and some half-transparent cards that are strategically placed to separate main subjects from background.
I applied the same illustrative approach when working on individual assets— especially textures. As you can see from texture sheet, they are mostly streaks, splotches and blobs with no recognizable features. However, when combined together they make just the right shapes and colors on screen, which is exactly what I wanted in this particular case.
