Pirate Lesson: Visual Development to 3D

WIP - Expected to finish project in Spring 2021

    The senior capstone I am working on, Pirate Lesson, is about a father teaching his son to drive the pirate ship during the midst of a battle. One of my roles is as one of the visual development artists establishing character designs, concept art, and the environments. Our main struggle throughout pre-production was trying to find a style to fit the story. I was drawn to combining both 3D and 2D elements to create a painterly effect that kept creeping up in my concept art. One of our inspirations was Tonko House's The Dam Keeper due to the beautiful loose impressionistic brush strokes. I found that they had developed their own shader through creating a point cloud. In our case, however, our computer capabilities were limited due to working at home throughout pre-production and production. Therefore, Dara Insixiengmay, the producer/character rigger for the film, and I had to get creative about how we were going to cheat to create this effect. 

We had the idea of creating an outer shell for an object and erasing sections to create an uneven silhouette. Our first test was on a fish character from a previous project (modeled by Erin Donahue and rigged by Dara Insixiengmay):

Dara and I specifically liked the effect on the flippers where the line felt like a wiggly brushstroke. The next step was adding animation on. Hal Kujawski animated the fish to do a run cycle on 12fps to give the more of the impression of 2D. Dara linked together the outer and inner shell to the same rig and I created the textures for the outer shell. 

Afterwards, I took the renders and composited them to blend the two shells more. While talking on zoom with Dara, Dara started flipping through the renders quickly manually and the lag and poor video quality caught our eye so I tried to replicate it. 

The addition of noise was crucial to creating the final effect we were going for. Inspired by this, I tried my hand at creating the effect on a barrel prop (modeled by Risa Suzuki) by using the same principle. I was curious if we could need to apply this effect to every object in the scene. 

Here was my first tests:

I wasn't a fan to say the least. Without the variety of the outer shell, the barrels just looked grainy. But I knew of the limitations of our computers and possibly rendering capabilities. I started on another test where I constrained a cube to the camera lens, textured it with frosted glass and used a brush displacement map I created. Here are the tests:

It did not create the effect I was going for and looked like glass from a crusty old shower. But despite this failure, this last render became the displacement map I used in after effects to then create this:

After some more iterations using Flo motion, turbulent displacement, brush stroke overlays, and wiggle effect, we combined together the barrel and fish into one scene:

After liking the results thus far, I began to create the textures for the son character (modeled by Jonathan Ip) with this method. Here are some of the tests:

At the end of fall quarter, we rendered out this shot to try to look like my concept art:

Animation by Hal Kujawski

                                                                     Final Composition

I was responsible for the son's textures, sky painting, and compositing using the method Dara and I created. The entire team had a hand in creating the test product. I am still currently adjusting this method to have more variation and not have to rely on one accidental render of frosted glass. 

During the end of this quarter, we created another test with some bird characters that we later decided will not be having the outer shell applied. Here's how the other shell I created looked, though:

(Chauncey Model by Hailey Akre)

We then tried the same method with another shot the entire team put together. 

Concept Art: 

Render:

Animation by Dara Insixiengmay

I was responsible for compositing using the method mentioned and 2D effects.

Pirate Lesson Team Members:

Dara Insixiengmay

Po Hsuan Lin

Tailah Williams

Brandon Kolaczewski

Hal Kujawski

Madelin Ahrens

Jonathan Ip

Hailey Akre

Risa Suzuki