Guardian

Guardian

 My drive to create this short film came initially from returning to my childhood past time of creating and telling stories, but with the novel dimension of learning a new digital skillset to begin bringing an imagined world to life. My short film is part of a much bigger world, a concept and story that has been developing across the span of my degree. "Guardian" is the short film I have submitted for the Rookie awards, and is a solo short film made in Blender. The following are some of the key objects I modelled and textured which are the focus of the story telling.

Granpa Rue's Chest

This chest model is a significant object in my short film. I used procedural and PBR texturing to create the materials which  needed to look old but also strong enough to have stood the test of time. The last high Sage, Granpa Rue sealed the most important of his civilisations artefacts and teaching materials with in it. The Guardians have fallen, but one day the darkness will return and these items will call to the next Guardian to protect the forest of Elriah and its inhabitants once more.

Astrolobe

This object was a further iteration of a previous model I made early in my studies. Its design purpose was simply to be something "astrological" that the Mages would use in some way to record or track time. 
Creating, texturing and animating this object was the second most time intensive part of my project. I was able to utilise a rigid body sim to make it bounce around my scene but had to also hand animate sections when the simulation was not working as intended.
The textures rely a lot on displacement to give the symbols an engraved look, so this was an object which I animated in a separate file then composited back into my main scene.

Sprites History Book

Made specifically for my capstone project, this object utilised both procedural and PBR material design. Procedural modifiers were used to animate the turning pages alongside a handy add-on called “commotion” which does an excellent job of offsetting animations. The simulation was made using a procedural geometry node system that moved particles though a vector noise field and was influence by wind to simulate the physics of the pages turning. Creating this book and the subsequent simulation was one of the most time consuming tasks in my project, with the simulation requiring a lot of iteration to get it to look like it belonged in the shot and was being influenced by elements within the scene.

Granpa Rue's High Sage Hut

This is the 3D scene in which "Guardian" takes place. Abandoned since the darkness infiltrated the forest of Elriah many years ago, it has been lost to the remaining sprites who were forced to forget about their magic in order to protect them. Instead they live a humble existence hidden away from the rest of the forests inhabitants, a shadow of a once ancient and proud civilisation.

My main area of interest in VFX has been turning towards look development, modelling, texturing, and simulation effects. I decided to utilise these elements rather than trying to create a character-based narrative, with the voice over reinforcing the story telling element and coming directly from the character at the centre of the story himself. Basing my project on the pivotal, inciting incident leading to the heros downfall in my world, I created a 3D space where I modelled, textured and animated the “key” assets that were the aesthetic focus of the narrative.

I love the complexity of procedural design, finding it challenging yet the resulting output very rewarding. All the main objects in my film are textured using procedural materials in Blender, while the simulations are a mix of hard and soft bodies alongside particle systems. Using a ray tracing render engine really helped with reinforcing the dark, mysterious lighting aesthetic but also produced challenges in regards to rendering time and textures looking different under changing lighting, which impacted my iteration process.

I quickly discovered that outputting a short film on my own was an ambitious undertaking and I was not able to complete everything that I had planned in the timeframe. However I felt I learned more in this active 14 week period than I had learned over the course of my degree, with the reality of outputting a short film very different to what I had imagined.

This was an incredibly challenging 14 weeks and I loved every minute of it. There were problems I ran into, some which I couldn’t solve which resulted in changing shots and plans, but each one that I did manage to navigate has further cemented dopamine pathways giving me the certainty that my career path lies in the VFX world.

I have learned that in VFX and the creative industries, every time you reach the top of the hill you are climbing there is a bigger one on the other side. Through my study process and working on Guardian I have learnt that getting comfortable with that unsettling feeling of having a bigger hill to climb, is the best door opener I could have hoped to find. 

Ebb and decay

“Ebb and Decay” is a smaller scale audio visual project which I have recently finished for an Audio Visual paper  in my undergraduate degree. The brief was to design a piece of audio and  a visual output to go along side it. My first foray into sound design, I recorded and edited all my own sounds – combining them into an ambient audioscape to go alongside a cinematic visual piece. Using Blender, I wanted to use this project to continue pursing my interest in texturing and look development, creating all the textures for my models procedurally. 

Ebb and Decay was inspired by the rhythm of organic energy as it ebbs and flows, before it ultimately succumbs to the inevitable forces of decay. Drawing inspiration from the natural world, Expectation and anticipation permeate the atmosphere, accompanied by a subtle undercurrent of nervousness and unease. The forest setting comes from the world in my capstone project, the forest Granpa Rue and his people live in – the forest of Elriah.

Ebb and decay was also my first project where I composited every element of the file. I did some compositing in my capstone film but took a deep dive into it for this project. I found compositing challenging at times and mistakes were made, but the resulting shots were much easier to edit, and the extra time taken at the start to set up paid for itself multiple times over trading for efficiency being able to iterate single layers.

I really enjoyed this project, and enjoyed working on matching the look to my existing world idea.

In this project I used geometry nodes to build systems(from tutorials) to create the animations and "growth" of the organic assets. I chose to use geometry nodes to begin learning and getting a better understanding of procedural workflows in a similar yet different application to materials within blender. Geometry nodes can be a powerful tool, I started with very complex systems I don't fully understand, however I have already learnt alot from the process.