Project 2 - Surreal

    Another project so soon after the first. Do I put out a project a day or something? No, unfortunately I can't do that, however since this is the start of this blog I figure I should put some of my recent projects here, even if they were made a little before this blog was. It's the easiest way to add more posts at the beginning like this.

    Today's post is on a project I actually did with a friend of mine. The only title I have for it is Surreal because that's what it is. The goal of this project was to create surrealism animation in only 6 hours. If you have no experience with 3D software, that may seem like a lot of time. It is not. Especially when starting completely from scratch like my friend and I were. The rules were we couldn't bring anything in. No pre-existing models, no textures, everything must be made during the 6 hour period.

    The first step was identifying what exactly we were going to make. It had to be surreal, yes, but what exactly? We ended up using an image as a reference. I would credit the artist, but I don't know the artist. I was given this image from a teacher at one point and I was never told where he got it from. This is the image we used.

 

    Next was making all of the assets such as the textures, models, and environment. My job landed with the environment, textures, and the animation. My friend made the characters and the fish. The trees were a little tricky as they are tall and have all the curvy branches only at the top. Another difficulty is that the whole tree is in frame. That means the perspective is distorted which isn't exactly easy in 3D. The result of the environment is one that is unique for sure. Once that was done and the characters and fish were imported from the friend we had a beautiful still. A still, however, is not enough. We needed animation.

 

    First I animated the fish. This was a fairly simple task. All I needed to do was put them on a curve and have them follow it. The characters had to have life. Life is something that can be hard to emulate. As humans we can spot even the smallest imperfection. While I will admit the characters aren't perfect, they are full of life and energy, which is more than I can say for some people.

    We ended up finishing the whole thing including the rendering in around 5 hours, so much quicker than planned. The resulting animation has a peaceful yet surreal feel to it. Personally it is one of my favorite projects to have worked on and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do