Adrift

Adrift is a 3D animated short film created by a collection of over thirty UT Dallas students. We have used the skills taught to us in classes to create departments and production managers to put together an animated short starting with an idea and ending with a final film after one year of production. I joined this project as the modeling/surfacing lead, responsible for interacting directly with modeling artists, giving them direction and guidance on how they were to go about modeling assets for the short. I would carry out weekly check-ins allowing me to keep tabs and give feedback to the artists on my team as well as keeping a constant dialog with the Director Alexa Boushey. We had extensive pre-production images and reference to help keep a cohesive look and feel to the assets and a very talented team helping it all come together.

Luno

Luno is the main character in Adrift. He is a struggling artist who’s goal in life is to spread happiness and positivity through his artwork. After being stranded in space watching his dying planet he begins to loose hope himself. Alone and afraid, he is suddenly saved by a not-so-different alien named Nova who gives him hope once more.

My work on Luno consisted of minor tweaking, correcting, and optimizing his original body sculpt, 3D modeling all of his clothing and his mouth geometry, and using Substance Painter to surface his clothing and hair. I integrated these surfaces into Maya using Arnold render engine and worked closely with the rest of the pipeline to integrate his UVs and surfaces with the non-UVed rigs without leaving behind Transfer Attributes nodes that tend to slow down rig animation.

Nova

Nova is the supporting role in Adrift. She makes her appearance later in the short and is supposed to be a beacon of hope for our main character Luno. She is supposed to come off as charismatic and caring, giving Luno a reason to not give up.

My work on Nova consisted of making adjustments to her model for aesthetic and optimization purposes, UV unwrapping all aspects of her model, surfacing in Substance Painter and Arnold, and creating blendshapes for a variety of facial expressions used in the rig and by animation to bring her to life. I worked closely with rigging and animation to know what blendshapes they would need and worked to integrate her final surfaced model with the non-UVed model while keeping the rig running smoothly and in an optimized fashion.

The Spread Effect

In addition to my role as Modeling/Surfacing lead, I am also creating the saturated spread effect that is integral to the visual story telling that we are trying to achieve with this project. This contrast between saturation will be a visual representation of happiness and hope within this short. This effect is created within After Effects using comping techniques and layered masking.

This is still a rough pass as other areas of the pipeline are still in full swing, but in the coming weeks, I will be working very closely with the lighting department to get shots with effects like this one prioritized so that I can begin working on the finalized shots faster and with finalized results.