Papel - 2021
Note: The short film Papel will be viewable here at a later date after submissions to film festivals are finished.
Environment lead
Environment Concept reference and Lighting guide:
My original painting I did for the mood and layout of the room.
Layout:
While the proper geometry for the environment was finished I modeled the room using primitives to be used for the 3D animatic.
Modeling:
As lead, I was responsible for keeping track of all of the models that needed to be worked on. As well, I modeled the couch, picture frame, and stairs.
Final Environment:
I was originally only supposed to handle retopology and UVs for around half of the environment but I ended up having to take over and do retopology and UVs for everything.
2D Animation Lead
While I did spend time drawing keyframes like in the video below. My primary job as 2D lead was to figure out how to incorporate the 2D elements into the 3D environment. To have the lighting, colors and shadows match the environment as well as to give the 3D animators a visual reference to animate to it was decided to have the parents be planes with images on them. This meant that the 2D animators had to work a bit in the dark for the keyframes testing their positioning in 3D space and then going back to the 2D to make edits. There was a good bit of wiggle room given for most of the shots and being able to manipulate the plane in 3D meant that the amount of back and forth to get the keyframes in place wasn’t that bad for most shots. The exceptions being 2D characters hugging the character and the shot of 2D characters reading. For those shots, I had to come up with different approaches. For the hug, I had the idea for two planes one set in front of the 3D character for the arms and one set behind. For the book seen the same approach was going to be taken originally but the angle needed for the arms to keep the lighting matching prevented this from being used. Instead, I cut up a plane and warped it in the position and shape we needed and used blend shapes in Maya to move them. The arms on the image sequence stay in place while the rest of the 2D characters shift and move to keep the arms from coming off of their spots on the UVs. To keep them still feeling animated they are redrawn each frame to keep the motion of traditional 2D hand-drawn animation.
