Just a Box

Just a Box

An animated short created with the softwares Zbrush, 3d Coat, Adobe Substance Painter, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Audition, Autodesk Maya, Arnold, Advanced Skeleton, Nuke, Adobe Premiere, Handbrake.

This particular animation is very personal to me because it touches on a massive inspiration for why I wanted to become an animator in the first place.  When I was younger, I was fortunate enough to grow up near the woods and would spend hours exploring and letting my imagination run wild.  Sticks became legendary swords, powerful wands, complex tools, and more, while my surroundings constantly shifted to suit the adventure at hand.  Cardboard boxes aided by becoming submarines, castles, massive beasts, and, as seen above, rocket ships.  I want to capture that essence with my work.  I want to use my animations to remind people how it felt to be a kid and spark that imagination with the creative medium of animation; to bring the stories I love to life.  Additionally, from when I was very young, even to now, I'm a part of a large family that also fosters.  I have personally seen how even the smallest of stories can bring laughter back and put a smile on someone's face, and remind them to be a kid without a care in the world.


Below are different videos demonstrating the process and some of the specifics of this particular animation and rig.

Texturing and Modeling

To nod toward a children's book illustration and help support the idea of imagination, I experimented a lot with textures and the overall style of the rig, which was, of course, a caricature of myself voiced by myself.  I brought every object in the scene (including the rig) into substance painter and hand-painted the shadows, highlights, and pops of color with looser brushes to give it all a painterly effect.  However, I wanted more depth than what toon shader will allow, so I made a layer shader with an aiStandard and aiToon and found a specific value and balance between both for each material.  That way, the painterly strokes were present, but shadows wrapped around the form for a half-toon look.

The grooming is hand-sculpted Xgen in Maya with thicker strands to look match the style and level of cartoonishness of the rest of the rig.  The typology was specifically made to keep the sharpness of the model that I had originally sculpted in Zbrush so none of the fine detail and sharp angles were lost. 

Example of several rig textures.

Example of several set textures.

Rigging

The body rig was created through advanced skeleton and edited to fit the specific rig by moving and adding extra joints where needed.

While experimenting with expressions and drawn thumbnails, I came up with the idea of changing the shape of the iris and pupils, which added another level of uniqueness to the style of the model and animation.  This took some experimenting, but by creating an image sequence of different textures and connecting it to a created attribute on the eyeAim ctl, I could switch between the different styles for specific expressions whenever the character blinked.  Plus, I could add as many designs as I would like for future projects and animation.

Some examples of the used eye textures.

To add an additional layer of expressiveness, I created my glasses through blend shapes and personally added attributes to make a rig that helped reinforce emotions, face line of action, blinks, and more.

Animation Test

This was a quick animation blend test to see if the rig needed any adjustments and test out the unique aspects of the eye textures and glasses so I could iron out any kinks before the final animation.

This test gave me time to explore the simulation of the flannel by adjusting the many different settings.  It was challenging to balance, making it look like the cloth was not stuck to the side of my body as I moved and looked natural while not being too distracting from the acting performance of the actual animation.  But in the end, I figured it out through a lot of fine-tuning.

Final Animation