The Box and Chico Bento

THE BOX

This project is based on a Swedish supernatural psychological thriller TV series called "The Box" created by Adi Hasak for Viaplay Group, showing on Viaplay (a streaming service with a vast selection of Nordic Noir). It was done for my Intermediate term at Think Tank Online.

In the show, the main protagonist, a police officer is driven by supernatural forces after witnessing a suicide committed during the interrogation of a murder suspect.

I was watching the show and got drawn to the look of the interrogation room (The Box) and decided to recreate it in 3D. The challenge was to try to capture the eerie feeling of the scene as much as possible.

I added a few props to the initial reference images, one of them was an Antique Kodak No 1 folding camera (1914 Eastman Kodak Co.) which I found on e-bay. Having the prop physically made the process very rewarding as I could measure my progress with the actual object. Another prop I worked on was an Adidas falcon sneaker which I had previously modelled but decided to texture for this project.

Reference board below

The project took about 5 weeks to complete and was created in Autodesk Maya with texturing for the room done in Adobe Substance 3D Painter while the Camera, Shoe, Evidence Box and Mug were textured in The Foundry Mari. Compositing was done in Adobe After Effects.

Modelling/UVs

I started by doing the modelling and UVs in Maya, working with a reference image from the show. Then, I supplemented the details using other scenes that had more information on each prop. 

I wanted to have the clock ticking sound as a base audio element so I needed to animate the second hand. I am very interested in technical challenges, so I decided to make a simple clock rig to drive the animation. Even though the shot could have been achieved without the rig using keyframes only, I felt it was a nice little way to explore expressions in MEL. 

The logic was to have the second hand drive the rotation of both the minute and hour hands, but I also needed to add a little mechanical jitter like you would observe in a real clock. This variation ($var) was keyframed for every tick and layering it this way helped me make adjustments quicker to achieve a result I was happy with. 

I also added a few spider webs around the scene using locators and curves with the help of a free script from highend3d.com called Spider web generator.(https://www.highend3d.com/maya/plugin/spider-web-generator-for-maya)

For the camera and pouch, I tried a workflow using photogrammetry to get a good representation of proportions. This idea was a suggestion from my mentor Jakob Kousholt and I found it very insightful and time-saving. Using Reality Capture I converted pictures I took on my phone to a 3d approximation of the camera. Then using this rough mesh as a guide I modelled the various elements comparing the result to the actual camera in front of me. This process proved more efficient than working with image planes and I would definitely use it as a workflow for any projects that I have physical representations of in the future.

Texturing the room was done in Substance painter and I used Mari for the details on the Camera, Pouch and Shoe

Secondary maps

Afterwards, look development was done in V-Ray and final composite done in After Effects. I also added some sound design to enhance the eerie mood of the final piece,

CHICO BENTO

This project was done for my foundation term with Think Tank Online and the task was to recreate any piece of concept art of our choice. I chose "Chico Bento" by Tiago Hoisel. The original illustration is so well done and full of energy that I thought it would be a very good challenge to try to capture it in 3D whilst keeping the resemblance as close as possible. 

Below is a comparison of both my rendition and the original image by Tiago Hoisel

I used Autodesk Maya for the modelling and UVs and Autodesk Mudbox to sculpt some finer details. The process took about 4 weeks with each week dedicated to Modelling/UVs, Sculpting, Texturing  and Look Development/Rendering respectively. This being my first ever project of this kind, I  watched a lot of tutorials from Digital Tutors on making stylized characters which helped me with the process. Additionally, matching the camera for this reference meant I had to break a few proportions because of the distortion of the objects closer to the camera. 

I used Mash for the tree leaves as instances of a few base leaf shapes. The fact that they are so clumped together and blurred with depth of field meant I didn't have to worry too much about interpenetrating leaves.

For the grass I used paint effects and hand modelled a few hero strands to match the reference image

Next I worked on the textures, taking inspiration and guidance from the "Creating a stylized female character by Crystal Bretz on the Gnomon Workshop. 

For the leopard fur, I initially wanted to create it using a bump map as opposed to actual fur, but during the look development process, I felt adding V-Ray fur would help with silhouette in certain regions. So I used a combination of both. I painted maps to drive the direction, density and length of the fur. 

Next, I made the eyebrows, whiskers and hair with XGen using a tube geometry workflow. I watched some tutorials from Gnomon to understand the workflow for this, in particular Creating a stylized groom in Maya & XGen with Bhavika Bajpai. Look development and rendering was done using V-Ray and compositing was done in Photoshop. 

Thank you for scrolling this far. 

I would also like to thank my mentors Rafael Resende and Jakob Kousholt, for their help through the projects above. I am also grateful for the opportunity to study with Think Tank online and the chance to work towards my dream of working in the VFX industry.