Reach For The Dead Animation Case Study
This was an open end personal project, my goal for this project was to try and do something bigger in 3D than I had done before. Starting with a simple story idea and trying and figure out how to show the actions and animations I wanted in it. Rather than focus on a single asset or animation, my focus was to try and bring multiple assets and movements together and tell a sort of loose structured narrative.
Here is the initial storyboard that overall needed to be kept vague.
-There's an old throne in a great hall. Maybe its an abandoned castle? Maybe the king and people are gone or struck ill? Maybe there was a war? Maybe it's a tomb?
For sure it is empty, and possibly old.
-There's vines crawling rapidly though a tunnel. Again, don't know if they are a positive influence or a negative one.
For sure it is something alive and moving quickly
What happens after was up in the air initially. Eventually a decision was made that the vines should consume the throne and a figure would emerge.
-There's an old throne in a great hall. Maybe its an abandoned castle? Maybe the king and people are gone or struck ill? Maybe there was a war? Maybe it's a tomb?
For sure it is empty, and possibly old.
-There's vines crawling rapidly though a tunnel. Again, don't know if they are a positive influence or a negative one.
For sure it is something alive and moving quickly
What happens after was up in the air initially. Eventually a decision was made that the vines should consume the throne and a figure would emerge.
Gathering concept ideas, creating the great hall and the throne was the start. The hall has fairly large proportions that are accurate to real life, but hard to tell exactly. The hall length is about 62ft. The addition of spaced and sized pillars for a nice visual effect. Chairs or pews were considered to show an audience, but overall it felt like it added a specific purpose to the room and added indirect narrative. Tombs don't have seating and did not want to rule that idea out to the audience.
After the great hall shot was finished. The vine tunnel was established. Duplicating and trying to randomize rocks wasn't hard work, but tedious.
The rock wall shot was created next. Rocks from the vine tunnel were put into a MASH instancer and attached to a large plane. From there scale and rotation settings were randomized. There are 20,000 rocks used for this scene.
Next, the vine crawling scene. The vines were animated crawling using CV curve and then attaching a cylinder to it with the curve wrap tool and adjusting the scale ramp and animating the offset and scale length. It was quite a challenge to get all the curves to circle around each other correctly and form the human cocoon.
Then came modeling out the figure and then animating it. The auto-rig feature was utilized as the model was not that complex and did not require complex movements. Afterwards, a particle emitter and small area light were added to the mesh. I had never used particle emitters with Maya before and it is a very, very steep learning curve. After about 10 hours of trial and error I started getting things about how I wanted them without destroying my computer.
The last step was the render everything out as an .exr using the Arnold renderer, then taking it into Blender and rendering out video from the .exr, and then putting all the shots into Premiere Pro to edit with the music. Overall this project easily took me about 2 months and around 300+ hours and render times for everything took around 60? It gets hard to tell, but I learned a lot and that was the ultimate goal.
