Deep Dive Crab Commercial
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by: David Valencia, CG Generalist & Art Director.
davidpekas1@gmail.com
Deep Dive Crab Commercial
This is the showcase of my capstone project for CNM Ingenuity's Digital Media college course.
The college course lasted 12 weeks, I worked nonstop during that time and was dedicated to this having work to show for this project. Due to time constraints I was unable to render and animate the other shots, however the breakdowns below showcase a lot of the work that was unfinished.
Breakdown Demo Reel
This is the breakdown demo video for my project, I also go into further detail below about the process.
I worked in areas such as: Research & Development, 2d Character Designer, 3d Character Design (Sculpt, Retopology, UV mapping, Texturing, Rigging, Skinning), Environment Design (Terrain, Structures, Organic props), layout Artist, Animator, Compositor, VFX & Simulations, Lighting & Rendering.
Research & Development
For this first part of the process, I used Pure Ref to gather and organize various references together. As I searched for references I tried looking for photos that do a good job of calling out how things should look from various angles. This helps visualize details about an object or creature and build a visual library of shapes, colors, forms.
2D Character Design
For the next part of the process I mainly focused on getting some turnaround drawings completed as i was limited in time, otherwise I would've liked to spend more time designing and doing visual development on the character and even for the environment and scenes as well.
left to right: Front View, Side, View, Top View, Bottom View.
3D Character Design
After that, I began work on setting up the References in Blender to begin roughly sculpting the shape of the crabs body. It took 2 Iterations but I was happy with the High Poly sculpt at 400,000 vertices.. I then retopologized the High-Poly sculpt, UV Unwrapped it and then baked the detail to a normal map. I did some manual normal map painting corrections due to a baking issue. After the detail was baked I started to add color and texture to the body, eyes, legs and shell of the crab. The texture is rather simple apart from the shell.
High-Poly "Crab" Sculpt
Retopologized Wireframe
Retopologized Wireframe
Texture Passes
Combined Render
High-Poly "Crab" Sculpt
High-Poly "Crab" Sculpt
Clay Render
Baked High-Poly Normal Detail
Diffuse
Ambient Occlusion
Glossy
Combined
Rigging & Skinning
This is the Rigging and skinning phase for the crab character, I created a line of spine bones and then an Inverse Kinematic setup for every leg, with a pole vector to have control over the rotation of each leg. Each leg was also parented to a root control bone for the floor and every body, claw, and eye bone was parented to a root hip bone. This setup allows the animator to move the upper body independently from the lower body.
Skinning / Weight painting Breakdown
Character Rig Breakdown
Environment & Prop Design
This is the environment and prop design stage, I created a procedural volcano using Gaea 2 Community edition, I enjoyed being able to export the terrain layers to Blender, allowing me control over the texturing and scattering of objects such as trees and rocks and bushes. For the prop design I tried to keep things low-poly ish, because I knew I would be scattering thousands of objects and wanted to keep the scene optimized for rendering. I had fun working on the texturing and modeling of the prop assets and using the Ucupaint add-on made the process much more fun and streamlined in Blender.
Layout & Animation
This is the Layout & Animation Phase, the layout stage consists of blocking out all the necessary parts for a scene so here i created a layout model for the crab as well as the environment, usually a layout artists work gets seen in the final production.
From there, I used my production ready model to start blocking out the characters movements based on the layout and began refining the animations.
Layout character model "Layout Crab"
Layout Animation
Character Animation, utilizing the Action editor in Blender
Lighting & Rendering
This is the Lighting & Rendering Phase, the layout stage consists of blocking out all the necessary assets for a scene so, here i created a layout model for the crab and and the environment, usually a layout artist's work gets seen in the final production.
From there, I used my production ready model to start blocking out the characters movements based on the layout and began refining the animations.
Layout character model "Layout Crab"
Gaea 2 Community Edition was used in this production to generate a mesh of a volcano & also create texture layers which act as masks for the terrain, that take into account erosion and similar real world weathering effects. I then utilize these texture layers in Blender and can now add PBR (Physically based rendering) materials to the corresponding texture layers masks. Thank you to QuadSpinner and Gaea, I appreciated being able to use the community edition and even learn tiling methods which helped me have more control afterwards in Blender.
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