An animatic of a personal short story involving failure and the process of overcoming it.
In this project I decided early on to create a short story using my original characters that I draw quite a lot during my free time. I was also very interested in using 3-D assets and environments as the locations where the digitally drawn 2-D characters would interact.
I drew the storyboards first (which can be found as a separate post in my portfolio) and then jumped straight into modeling while letting the first draft sit and bubble in the creative pot. The first draft took me a couple hours to get down on paper and I created location plans and asset lists according to it. I wanted to create three different locations and planned the assets so it would be easy and fitting to recycle them between them as much as possible to take away strain from creating various different items for each location. I also decided to go with a painted and cartoony look for the assets, as my characters are also very cartoon/anime and manga inspired.
I kept the assets low poly, as my laptop is old and can't handle a lot of polygons at once. I am also from the era of late PS1 games, and the look of those games is very close to my heart. I was also planning on using Substance Painter to paint the textures, but had to resolve to the good old Maya open in one window and Clipstudio Paint open in the other to see where some of the UV edges fall, as again, my laptop is old and could not run the program properly.
On another note, I was also planning on using Clipstudio's animation tools, but since I own the base version of it, I was only able to create one second of animation at a time, which is also not too optimal, so instead I opted to draw each frame as an illustration layer and exported them out one at a time before importing them into my video editing program and placing them in order there. Thankfully, compiling and editing the animatic together took me only about 7-8 hours whilst the actual drawings took me 2 weeks (about 60-70 hours) to complete.
The brunt of the work was put in the 3-D side and I spent a lot of time modeling and UV-mapping the assets, putting the locations together (lights, cameras), rendering and painting the textures. Modeling and UV mapping took about two weeks (about 70-80 hours) , whilst putting the locations together took about a week in total (roughly 30 hours). I didn't keep a tight book on rendering as I had to do a lot of it on demand while drawing the final animatic, but I'd say it took maybe 30-40 hours in total, including test renders. Painting the textures also took about two weeks take or leave, so maybe 60-70 hours, including creating and assigning the materials in Maya.
The whole project took me about 2-3 months ( something like 220 hours in total) to create from start to finish and I am very happy how it all turned out.