Autodesk Maya,
Renderman,
Substance Painter.
15 Weeks
8 Team Members
Project Management,
Lead Character Artist,
Lead Lighting,
Lead Compositing,
Concept Art.
Ready, Set, Flight is an animated short about a bird fighting his own reflection. This animated short was created by 8 undergraduate students using Maya and Renderman.
Led project management efforts, including planning meetings, Jira management, task assignment and tracking, and documentation.
Responsible for all lighting within the boxing ring scenes.
Responsible for compositing all shots and implementing 2d effects.
Created the main character, including Concept Art, Modeling, and Surfacing.
Assisted with environment concept art.
Responsible for modeling and surfacing using Substance Painter, Maya, Nomad Sculpt, Zbrush, and Renderman.
Original concept's had our bird being a Cardinal, which we ended up scrapping due to us wanting to distinguish our bird with the enemy bird with different colored lighting. Therefore, we opted to switch to a more neutral colored bird.
We liked the idea of differentiating the face using a different swatch of color on the face. However, we also determined that the black on the face may cause issues in readability of expressions at a distance. This further cemented that we needed to change birds, and we began work on selecting the next bird we wanted to feature.
The bird we ended up choosing was a European Robin, characterized by its neutral grayish-brown feathers and bright orange central chest feathers. Giving us a great pop of color while keeping the neutrality for the lighting.
I used these character sketch sheets to explore the anatomy of our bird, how our fingers may function compared to a persons anatomy, and possible poses and expressions that could be useful for our riggers. All of these drawings were incredibly useful as I began to move into the modeling phase for our character.
Additional sketches of Robin. I was trying to really lock down the shape language and more exaggerated expressions.
