Antique Antics - Animated Short Film (2024)
Programs used were Maya 2022, Procreate, Unreal Engine 5, Surface 3D Painter, Photoshop, Nomad Sculpt, Davinci Resolve, & Nuke. Rendered using Renderman 25.
Roles: Project Manager, Rigging Lead, Character Surfacing Lead, & Co-Modeling Lead.
Other Contributions: I also assisted with Concept Art, Asset Modeling, Surfacing, and Animation.
Organized our timeline for production of the short using Google Sheets and Google Drive as well as maintained logged hours per teammate. Held online meetings outside of class using Discord to get updates from everyone on how they were doing on a weekly basis on Sundays.
Also met in-person outside of class to work on the project. Planned accordingly for all aspects of the pipeline from Concept to Rendering and Compositing.
Project Management Documentation
Modeling & Surfacing - Holly, Hope, Ribbons, & Jingle Bell
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Callout sheet reference by Corain Marneweck
Responsible for all aspects for the Jingle Bell. Responsible for the Lookdev of Holly, Hope, & the Ribbons. Eye pngs drawn by Corain Marneweck.
Modeling & Lookdev - Harold the Bobble Turtle
Modeling and Lookdev references
Responsible for Modeling and Surfacing Harold the Bobble Turtle. Inspired by a bobble toy turtle I have that I used as reference. Initially he was supposed to be red, but it was seen as too distracting in previous film iterations. I changed the color to green to avoid the attention going to him.
Modeling & Lookdev - Old Telephones
In an Antique shop there's bound to be old telephones not being used anymore. I was in charge of Modeling and Surfacing the red and black telephones. I wanted to challenge myself to hard surface modeling as I've only been organically modeling since starting this project. Using the box modeling method to start the proxy models and adding edge loops to the creases I was able to model the phones to be shown in the cabinet and side table.
Rigging - Holly Cat Rig
With Antique Antics, it was my 2nd time rigging a quadrupedal character. This semester, however, I found out that I wasn't rigging a correct way. This project has been a huge learning curve for me since I had minimal experience rigging beforehand from my previous project Hot Mess (2023). There are many different ways to do so but I found out about offset groups and had to resort to making 3 different rigs of the same cat since I've been having so many technical difficulties.
When it came to rigging 2 characters for our short, as a team we decided it'd be best to have similar body models for both of them so I can use the same skeleton for each one and save us time with rigging to move into animation since it we had quite a lot of animation.
Features: Both of the cat rigs come with IK/FK switches for the front legs, back legs, and tail, eyebrow and mouth controls using BlendShapes, as well as keyframeable expressions control for the eyes using set driven keys where I translate the U using a sprite sheet that contains all of the eyes in one png depending on what expression is selected. The mid spine control comes with a follow attribute in which the animator may choose to animate where it follows the torso control, root control, both torso and root control, or world.
Holly Eye expressions used in both Holly & Hope rig by Corain Marneweck