Variety
As a Motion Designer, it’s important to be able to adapt to a variety of styles and techniques to achieve the best result. This project challenged me to create 3 projects over 3 weeks that used a variety of techniques, looks, and tools to create 3 projects that were at least 5 seconds each.
There were many programs and tools I hadn’t learned before, so I took it upon myself to learn something new in each project. This challenged my speed as a designer and animator as well as taught me how to research what I am looking to create when learning something new.
Animations
Week 1
Cloth simulations are something I’ve always seen as beautiful and I’ve always wanted to create the organic shapes that come from them so for this project, I looked into learning Marvelous Designer to create the simulations.
I chose a black and white palette to emphasize the contrast and beauty of the simple world behind the opening wall. The atmosphere of the scene is very much calming through it’s visuals and sound design reminiscent of Japanese Minka.
Zephyr
As I was creating this piece, I thought about what conceptually would be driving it and since adding window to a curtain is one of the first things you can learn about Marvelous Designer, I thought that the wind could be the driving force for this piece. It’s invisible, yet always moving through this serene environment. As the doors slowly open to reveal the beautiful nature behind them, what’s always there is this force, the zephyr.
Takeaways:
Marvelous Designer is so powerful and a great quick way to create cloth dynamics so I’m happy I took the time to learn it! I also enjoyed getting to play with volumetric lighting inside of Redshift and create a controlled environment to showcase all of it put together.
Week 2
Simulations are so much fun to play with and can add another level of satisfaction to a project if utilized correctly. For this piece, I focused all on the simulation possibilities inside of C4D to see what can achieved faster natively.
I don’t use simulated animation much in my work since I prefer more control over the movement of objects in my scenes, but getting out of my comfort zone gave me something new that I can use in future projects.
ABCD
I wanted to think of a designed way to showcase these different simulations, so I decided to follow an Instagram trend focusing on letters of the alphabet. This piece could be expanded upon in the future as a result. The studio lighting and fun color palette made it enjoyable to watch and a cool experiment!
Takeaways:
I love using Houdini but now that I’ve practiced some simulations inside of C4D, I now know what is easy to achieve natively without wasting time in development. I also don’t get the opportunity to experiment with colors much in my work so it was great to get to play in this piece.
Week 3
Kitbashing is a very fun and precise art that many game developers use to create expansive environments. I wanted to try using the technique in this piece along with some editing techniques I had been practicing.
While a lot of motion work doesn’t include incredibly large worlds being showcased, I wanted to see how I can use kitbashing to imply a greater space to what the audience was seeing and utilize atmosphere in 3D to enhance that illusion.
Atmosphere
It was great to get to create these space and showcase them in a graphic space so I wasn’t only playing with composition inside of 3D but also in Post. I had to balance the complexity of some scenes with the simplicity of the surrounding graphics and find a way to seamlessly transition from shot to shot. I titled the piece Atmosphere because the idea behind every scene was they were based inside of different habitats of the world.
Takeaways:
Kitbashing is very hard and I didn’t achieve anything nearly as grand as many examples you might find online but now that I’ve played more with it, I feel more confident about using pre-existing models to create worlds and objects inside of my 3D scenes in future projects!
The Finale
This was a fun experiment and it challenged my ability to create pieces fast and efficiently while learning new things along the way. I love the result of each of them!
My biggest takeaway overall was not the individual techniques I learned but how to learn new things on a tight schedule without overloading myself.
Animations