3D Animation Portfolio

Project: Rocket Launch

What started out as a fun idea, quickly turned into one of the best projects I have made. The idea was to fake a moon landing with an astronaut from my own nation. It ended up with a project that was made over 6 months using various techniques and softwares. Unreal Engine enabled some amazing things for me with the combination of Maya, Houdini and After Effects. The Final Scene ended up having over 1.3 bilion polygons, which was a huge surprise to me as Unreal handled it extremely well a averaging over 30fps in the viewport. Real Time rendering has come a long way and there is still a lot more room to grow. 

Post processing in Unreal Engine is some of the most impressive post processing I have seen. Being able to see changes in real time with lighting, colors and passes was mind blowing. In the end I personally fell in love with the Black & White Images with a little bit of grain, which gave that old 50s look. It is astounding how easy it is to get a completely different feel and image within a matter of minutes thanks to Unreal Engine

When it comes to simulations Houdini is still the king, and with the new world depth pass from Unreal it was quite easy to make a composite with both programs. In the future I would love to explore Unreal + Houdini + Nuke pipeline which looks extremely promising, however I had to Stick with After Effects on this project as it was best known to me at the time.

Mess: Digital Double

Started as a 3D Scanned Head. The first layout was rough so i decided to cut the shirt out of the model for the time being. We later used the scan to project some displacement details to the final sculpt

Using Wrap3d I could perfectly wrap my model onto the 3D Scan Store Multi Expression base.

After I realized, how great the expressions looked, I went ahead a using a Base Color + Displacement package

I Also decided to sculpt in 52 blendshapes so that the head could be used with facial capture. I sculpted these blendshapes as layers in zbrush and exported them to maya afterwards.

Once in Maya, I made a rig for the head and neck to move, which in combination with the blendshapes, allowed me to do full facial capture on my character using MocapX. The hair on the character is also done in Maya via Xgen.

I modeled in some jaws and reused an eye from a previous project and played with the shader a little bit. I also added a rig and controls to both the eyes and jaws.

Using Arnold was a great choice for this project as I explored making a realistic skin shader. The quality was well worth the wait time as it took around 25 minutes to render per frame on a RTX 3090.