Loose Leaves

Process

From the onset of brainstorming a script to finishing up the last edits in compositing and color correction, we learned a tremendous amount about the 3D-production pipeline.

When we began with storyboarding, our character designs were yet to be finalized. We struggled a lot with compositions and tried to avoid the default medium close up shot.  However, we had fun playing with different types of body shapes and tea flavors for our main characters, such as a matcha boba tea blend and a creamy rose tea. Below you can see a few of our storyboards as well as the finished character sheets for Mia and Mom.

Modeling, Rigging, Previsualization, and Animating

These steps were probably some of the longest in the whole production pipeline. While we kept our set relatively similar to a modern-style kitchen, we struggled a lot with creating quadruped rigs that functioned like animals and didn't break. The mom rig had multiple issues in particular, and studying how a rabbit would hop also proved challenging. However, we found many fixes to our rig issues, and we also found that adding a hip controller aided the animation process immensely when creating a rabbit hop in with IK.

Below you can see a wireframe of our set, as well as a glimpse of some of the issues we had with our mom rig.

Coloring, Lighting, and Compositing

We wanted to emphasize pastels and play with how various saturation levels affected the tone of each scene, so working closely with the color scripts and render layers was vital to achieve the desired effect of our short.

While our characters’ colors were finalized earlier, we experimented a lot with our set to find colors that complemented our characters. Below you can see our color scripts, a breakdown of our render layers, some early color tests, and two final renders at the end of the process views.

We hope you enjoyed viewing our senior thesis film and getting a glimpse into our production process. Thank you!