3D Animation - Research

When I first began my research process I looked at a variety of animations. Even though during this brief we are to use Maya it doesn't mean that we can't gain any helpful tips from any other sort of animation like camera angles etc.

I came across Colorbleed which is an animation studio founded by a few friends who created the very popular Mac 'n' Cheese animation. I must say that whilst watching their animations as well as the 'making of' a few of them it inspired me to push myself to the limits because they mention that their drawing skills aren't the best yet they don't let that stop them from creating beautiful animations.

When I watched Mac 'n' Cheese I was left speechless. Knowing that students could create such a professional looking animation. But let's get to the point. Mac 'n' Cheese is a 3D animation created using Maya, Eyeon Fusion, Pixologic Zbrush, Adobe Photoshop and TVPaint. There were 4 people working on this as their graduation project and it took them about five months to complete it.
They really wanted to focus on the visuals, action sequence and the intensity of it all more than the actual story line, i believe it's due to the fact they wanted to show people their skills as animators rather than story writers.
Their aim was to make it look very 2D. So they used Fusion and played around with the colour layers to make it happen.
Also they say that when you're trying to create a 2D styled animation you don't need as much detail. So what they did is actually create their own textures in Photoshop instead of using the textures and colours provided in Maya.
To help the animation get the right feel they used the right music in at the right time and a few other tricks like:
- In some scenes they scaled the characters to really emphasize on the difference in them both.
- They used camera angles like they would in western movies in the end scene because they thought it has that feel to it and I must say it helps to build the pressure of it and really works!
- They also used camera shaking effect to show the strength in the biggie ( the bigger character).
I personally wondered how the scene of the world twisting and them running down the road was created cause it looks so complicated. It turns out it wasn't so complicated after all.
The scene was simply made by selecting the whole environment and using the twister former on it. It's one of those things that are really simple to do but give out an amazing effect in the end.

When wandering through their website I came across a Macro section and when I opened it I thought it's their photography section. Turned out it's not. In here they use different rendering and lighting techniques, to create things looking as amazingly detailed and beautiful as photographs taken with a great macro lens. At first I couldn't believe it, it looks so realistic. It was a range of images from hard metals to soft fabrics and it looked too good to be true. See for yourself!