The Beveled Seagull

THE BEVELED SEAGULL

We are five friends who attended for six months a CG Master at BigRock School, Italy. After graduation, we kept in touch with each other and decided to create a team to participate at the Rookies Awards 2022.

We are all huge fans of pirates and we wanted to recreate a scene in such a scenario, but a little chaotic and with a funny look. Our main inspiration for this project came from the videogame Sea of Thieves and we chose to render our scene with a so-called “long take” where everything is frozen.

We chose to settle our story on a fantasy ship where a bunch of pirates start to fight for a silly reason: a board game. This leads to a big confusion on the ship, characters start to punch each other and ducks begin to run everywhere while the captain has disappeared, scared to death to be hurt.

Our idea was to give the scene a toy-ish look, so we developed our characters as they were actual toys, working on plastic textures and easy facial expressions.

Our biggest challenge was to model the entire ship, and bring together every piece even when they were modeled by different people (in different places as we are based in 5 different cities in Italy) and create a realistic fog in Unreal 5 thanks to real time rendering.

SOFTWARE USED

Modeling: Maya, Blender, ZBrush, AllPlan, Cinema 4D

Texturing: Adobe Substance Painter, Photoshop

Lighting and rendering: Unreal 5

WORK BREAKDOWN

MODELING

We first started to model every character that we imagined in the scene trying to keep a coherent style. We created a sort of “character editor” in Blender as a base mesh so everyone could create his own with different features such as hair, eyes, ears and so on.

Then we focused on modeling this huge ship while characters were being textured.

In particular, building the ship was very challenging due to the massive amount of work splitted between us. We worked closely as a team to make sure that every part would match the others properly. We spent a lot of time creating as many props as possible to make this ship functional and realistic: ropes were definitely the hardest part and the most exciting one as we had to connect sails and mains with the rest in the best way possible.

TEXTURING

For the textures part, we chose a “plastic” look, the one you can find in toys like Playmobil or Lego, to give our characters a cute appearance despite the battle going on. We were specifically looking for this contrast. So we went for a toon stylized hand painted textures with bright colors.

RENDERING AND SIMULATION IN UNREAL 5

An important element in our storytelling is the fog. We spent several days looking at references to create something that was realistic with the right amount of randomness. At the end we managed to render the fog as a sculpted mesh to which we applied a specific particle system.

SOUND DESIGN

Last but not least we curated the sound design part choosing a free theme to create a pleasing musical environment and some ambient noises such as crowd yelling, seagulls, ocean waves and wind in the background. Despite the fact that our scene is frozen, we wanted to make it believable and entertaining to watch.

We really enjoyed working on this beloved project especially because of the great team we had that gave us the opportunity to learn new things and improve our communication skills in a group. The best things are done together.

Thank you for having a look at our project.

Alessia, Celeste, Matteo, Paolo, Pietro.