Mogra

I have had my eye on these set of character models over on 3Docean for a while now. So in my list project ideas I had the idea to create a simple story around these characters. Something similar to what would be on a mobile phone game cut scene, “think angry birds cut scene”. It would be playful and light hearted and convey some simple premise. I came up with a little battle versus idea between the two types of characters. I made a quick written outline/story board, then I started a quick 3D animatic of the story.

I soon realized (after procrastinating to do it) that this was going to take more time then I wanted it to so I amended my idea to do a quick smart phone video game intro animation. As an animator I all ways like these sort of scenes before the game I play even if there only 5 seconds or so long. So with my new idea I went into production of designing my game’s logo.

I first sketched a hand full of ideas before trying to create them illustrator creating various version of the my favorite ideas. After I was able to pick out which one I like the most I posted it on hunie.co, the newly revamped design critique site for some feed back. After receiving some good response and ideas, three versions later I had a design that I liked enough to bring it into C4D.

Building it when straight forward as building any standard 3D logo. I keep the subdivisions low on the text shape to fit in with the low-poly style I was going for. After building it and texture it I started buying the models I would need and animating them in my scene. I had a rough idea of the overall animation sequence written down so I as I got each model I started animating it to the end of the sequence before getting the next one. Some of the models came with animation on them but for most of them except one I re-did the animation since most of their movements are just a repeated loops of a simple action. After animating them I did a quick lighting setup using Maxwell render to give it a sunlight feel with a strong shadow overhead.

My last step was to do some composting in after effects and some sounds effects. Originally was going to find a music track for the background, but thinking back on some of the games I play not many of them have music for this part. Usually the music doesn’t hit till the main interface so I went the route of using only sound effects which I got from freesound.org. In the end I like this better especially since I had fun mixing the stereo sound the various creatures and vehicles. I really want to try a 5.1 mix just to see how it works and hear sound all around me.

 

For the past couple of months I’ve gotten into a new webcomic called JL8 which features various members of the justice league as little kids in school. The go to school like normal kids except that they have super powers and the comic explores this in many ways often with a side of humor.

 The creator of the comic Yale Stewart posted a some desktop wallpaper images on his deviantArt page and I got the ideas to try and do some camera projection using those images. I chose to use C4D because it has projection man which makes this very easy to setup. 

 

 After brain storming what kind of camera move I wanted to do I found a character model that was similar to Hal in the picture and started adding parts that would match the image and give it some slight depth. Using projection man to manage the images allowed me to easily jump back and forth between C4D and Photoshop and extract various parts. Above is a hardware video where you can see the geometry I used.

 My final goal was to create a simple 5 second camera move animation that featured Hal focusing on sky and his glowing ring.

 Check out the comic JL8