Andrey Agafonov - 3D Animation and Game Development

3D ANIMATION

Vocation Stronger than Death

This was my entry for the 11th CG Boost challenge. The topic was "Graveyard" and I knew it would be a fun challenge for me, who gravitates towards a more stylized Pixarish look. So I created a story that drove all the decision making for this artwork:

The story is inspired and the character is based on the real English landscape artist Lancelot Brown, more commonly known with the byname Capability Brown. He is remembered as "England's greatest gardener", who designed over 170 parks, many of which still endure. The scene shows Lancelot following his passion 200 years after his passing in a quite...uh, bony form, which came to the visitors of the graveyard's park as a rather frightening surprise.

Let it serve as a reminder that your passion, your craft, your art, your work can be stronger than any circumstances, even the most inevitable ones.

You can read what the judges of the challenge say about the artwork here.

I modeled the environment, characters, and props (except for the gravestone, which is a retextured 3d scan) from scratch in Blender. Models were textured in Substance Painter and Marvelous Designer was used to create clothes. Also, Grasswald sped up the workflow for grass and other vegetation.

I sculpted every bone of the skeleton with one eye on the Atlas of Human Anatomy and the other on the anatomy of skeleton characters from Coco. I rigged the skeleton for posing and rigged the skull with the shape keys.

Oh, and one more thing I like to do is to add little fun details that are hard or impossible to notice, that only I know are there. It may be a bit childish, but it makes me smile and helps me through more tedious parts of the process. So for this one, the people you see peeking on the background are actually Inspector Gadget, Dwayne Johnson, and a random office woman. Don't know if you needed this, but here it is.

Here Comes the Drone!

This one is based on the "Baby Robot" topic and captures a lovely moment between the father and the baby. I made the baby more modern and plasticky to show the difference between generations, but at the same time connect them through traditions and habits. His dad probably had the same cereal when he was a young, er, whatever young robots are.

The whole scene started with the idea of the cereal box, that I had a lot of fun designing. You can probably guess what actual brand was my inspiration. I wanted my props and environment to tell more about the world where the characters exist.

This scene was the first one I made in Blender 2.8 and everything from modeling and texturing to rendering and compositing was done inside of Blender. It was rendered in Eevee (Blender's real-time render engine).

One little character from this scene that I particularly like is this small plant bot that I created based on a real concept of a flower pot that reacts to sunlight. I feel like this little guy deserves his own story... someday.

Bonus points for noticing Flipped Normals lighting scene setup :)

How Christmas Was Saved

Well, you know, everyone needs a break from work... even if they work one night a year. Luckily Rudolph was there in time to change Santa's mind, save Christmas, and puzzle occasional pilots along the way.

This was a fun Christmas project to make. It also was my first attempt at sculpting and hair simulation.

GAME DEVELOPMENT

Sankyo Digital Alarm Clock

This was my first PBR asset made specifically for the games part of my portfolio. I made this asset to showcase my technical skills and to demonstrate the ability to create production-quality-level models. I was lucky to be introduced to Ryne Petersen, a senior environment artist, who offered to mentor me on this project. I learned a lot and improved my workflows significantly.

All high-poly, low-poly, and UV work were done in Blender 2.81. Baking and texturing were done in Substance Painter. Main shots were rendered in Cycles, Eevee real-time render engine was used to render additional images. The clock is based on several Sankyo digital clock models.

2 Texture sets were used, main 2048 texture and a 512 decals texture for numbers and fonts.

Main reference:

Leather Armor Boots

This was an art test I took. The task was to create a piece of armor for the game character. Style-wise the idea was to have a somewhat stylized shape with realistic textures.

For this project, I challenged myself to work with a tight deadline. I added details to a very basic concept that was given,  I used the character's leg as a base mesh to create the main parts of the boot, then did sculpting on top. Lowpoly was created by adjusting the base geometry. After baking and texturing the model was put in Unreal Engine.

Highpoly / Lowpoly / Wireframe

The final boot model has 8K tris and uses a single 2K texture set.

Biodex C-Arm Table - 840

This was another art test. The task was to prepare a simple grey box scene of an operating room in Unity with baked lighting setup. One focal foreground asset with a high priority should be fully modeled and textured. I have chosen to make this operating table as my focal asset.

The intended use is within a training VR experience for surgeons that runs on high-end hardware, so the model has high polycount (140K Tris) and uses 4 2K texture sets.

I started by collecting reference images, specifications, and measurements. I used camera matching techniques and image editing software to measure some parts that were not listed in specifications during the blockout stage. Careful planning went into the level of detail on the final lowpoly mesh. I tried to work procedurally where I could to keep meshes easily adjustable (increase/decrease polycount) and optimize highpoly/lowpoly workflow later.

I have sculpted surface details on some parts of the table like the mattress and the base to get nice details in the normal bake to match the reference and achieve a more realistic look.

Parts like OR rails, all bolts, wheels, etc. share UV space to save overall texel density. I then determined the number of texture sets I am going to use for the model. I decided to use a total of 4 sets, 3 sets for the model + 1 decal set. Two sets have similar texel density, while the third one has higher texel density and includes parts of the model which the player will potentially interact with, they also received some extra love and polycount during modeling.

I used the materials listed on the product page for texturing (carbon fiber, plastic, rubber, stainless steel), paying close attention to reference images and real-life objects. I created several base materials and then built necessary detail layers on top, heavily utilizing masking and anchoring techniques. I made sure to use ACES in Substance Painter to achieve visual consistency across applications.

One fun thing I had to do was recreating the pictograms for the controllers.

After exporting textures I duplicated and adjusted mirrored geometry. I then created wires, which I chose to make separately at this stage. This allowed me to create them procedurally and control the final polycount of the whole model, which can be easily adjusted by further decimating wire's geometry and can be easily kept under 100K tris. Not including wires into baking also saved quite a bit of UV space, they look good simply using Unity's basic material with just albedo and smoothness parameters. I then added the second UV channel for the lightmap and repacked all islands in 0 to 1 UV space.