3D ANIMATIONS
INSECTS
A praying mantis haunts a beetle in a sureal and dreamlike short cinematic piece
Insects was an attempts in my spare time to improve artistic and technical skills specially in rendering and compositing stages. A challenging yet fun project for sure
Credits:
Ramtin Ahmadi - Art Direction, Execution and Sound
2014
Technical Overview
For this one I took sometime and studied about the insects, their anatomy and of course movement, Specially in slowmotion. That facination with the way the moved in space in slowmotion really triggered the creation of this piece personally.
Zbrush used for sculpting and 3D coat to recreate proper mesh topologies and UVs, However for the reasons explained above Mudbox seemed like the right solution at that time for UDIM texturing.
After the modeling, A basic "character rig" per character was created, With enough controls to perform the actions for this one particular shot.
Perhaps an overkill, But I was quite keen to learn and become good with multi-tile also known as UDIM texturing. So the insect characters ended up having more than four 4k tiles for PBR texture sets!
Lighting of the scene was done in an interesting way. Based on the rough camera movements I'd built initially I created a plane of polygone that covers the background at all times. So using the paint tools in Maya I painted a very rough version of the back ground and marked the brightest parts based on where the animation keyframes were taking place.
This simple guide map then was brought into Nuke and with few simple matte painting operations I would have an HDRI image that could handle the background as well as the actual light coming from behind the characters.
Of course and additional dome light as well as a few complimantry lights to make the image pop more aesthetically.
The water droplets and splashes were simple spheres, Animated manually with some noise deformers layared on top. Additionally some drops were scattered using mel scripts (the quickest solution available at that time) on the surface of the characters, Something observed often during reference observations.
There usually seems to be a few grains of sand or droplets of water scattered and stuck on their skin as they're constantly in interaction with their environment. Of course these details are only important if the characters are supposed to be visible that up close on the screen.
The subsurface scattering algorythm of Arnold has always been one of the best at its class! After getting those great transulent render passes from Arnold, I ended up pushing the effects even more at compositting stage, Using additive operations and controlling the amount of visibility on the parts of the body I wanted to push and exagrate the effect on, Such as the wings, eyes and the body.
A seperate render layer was dedicated to each charcter, So the edge artifacts produced by 2D Depth Of Fields Effects could be avoided Since my aim was to push the effect to its extreme.
As usual I used additional mask passes for color correction purposes to integrate different layers and elements work to gether in a believable way.
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