Beetle Animation Shot
Final night scene. Responsible for materials, shaders, textures, lighting in Maya. I put my own sky photography into a geo cam utilizing matte painting techniques, color grading, optical glow, and atmospheric perspective in Nuke.
Daytime animation shot turned toon style in Nuke.
Textured City shot with my own sky photography added via matte painting techniques in Photoshop and Maya.
Then I learned about Substance Painter! As well as edited my original vision according to the percieved story and finals goal. VW Beetle turntable. Responsible for materials, shaders, and textures.
The first version of the VW Beetle I did utilized only BDRF Arnold Standard Surface shaders in Maya. It's one of my favorite colors but didn't fit the story.
Camper turntable. Responsible for materials, shaders, and textures.
Metallic looking camper. I liked the old powdery version better though. Also I was still getting used to the OCIO color management settings and getting everything set up correctly accross multiple programs.
Character turntable. Responsible for materials, shaders, and textures.
Nodes in Nuke.
This project includes the final animated scene, as well as turntables and shots for each asset. Showing my texture and color work to create a finalized animation shot according to industry standard pipeline procedures.
I applied Arnold Standard Surface BDRF shader techniques in Maya, edited / created stencil / sticker assets in Photoshop, applied stencils / stickers to materials in Substance Painter, painted various textures such as rust, dirt, and specular roughness variances in Substance Painter, applied textures to assets in Maya, exported textured models in Maya, saved animations as alembic cache, imported cached animation into shot scene, transfered textures to animated rigs and cached animations, used proper naming conventions and grouping methods for everything to work smoothly together in Maya, utilized industry standard lighting effects to light a night scene, rendered multi-level EXR files utilizing multiple AOVs and Crypto Matte objects to import into Nuke for color grading, masking, effects such as optical glow, and atmospheric perspective, rendered out of Nuke as a PNG for import into Media Encoder, all while maintaining consistent color utilizing OCIO color management rules on a VW Beetle, Camper, Character, and City environment.
I even utilized the color psychology I learned concurrently in Cinematics for Animation and VFX class in the color grading to add another layer to the story telling of my animated scene. The atmospheric perspective is light pink to show leaving boredom or remorse behind, the glow of the dash lights indicates joy or anticipation, and the orangish glow of the streetlights represents adventure and excitement.
I am obsessed with colors and textures! Don't get me wrong, this was an extremely challenging course. I learned multiple ways to achieve looks that I never thought was possible. Getting realistic looking renders are not easy, but I found the challenge soo exhilarating! Each asset had its own unique challenges and there was plenty of troubleshooting that came along with it. Each one was just like a new puzzle to solve, and I loved it. So much so, that I found myself fixating on this one class, often. It might be hard to believe but I learned a lot of visual node-based coding in this class. My instructor even taught me how to look "under the hood" of some Nodes to take a closer look at what was going on. I can't wait to take Advanced Lookdev and Lighting, but that will have to wait until Spring 2025, I have a few more core classes I need to get done before I focus on Textures, Materials, and Lighting.