Point Of View – Final Project
The idea for this film started with how much I hate alarm clocks waking me up in the morning. It then progressed to a timer for an oven and a phone ringing. All these things have annoying sounds, but you need them otherwise you’d wake up late, burn the cake or miss the phone call. For this film, I decided to take away the fact that you need the alarms and emphasise the annoying sounds and the reaction of the character hearing the sounds that are disrupting his peaceful day. I used mainly ZBrush, Maya, Substance Painter and Photoshop. I compiled the film in Premiere Pro, adding sounds that I recorded. I learnt a lot throughout this project and had to solve a few problems on the way. This was my first time rigging and animating a 3D character, so I found that quite tricky, but I’m happy with how it turned out. It was also my first time modelling a stylized character as I usually go for realism. The project took years to render so I would like to learn how to optimise a scene in Maya for faster renders. I also planned to model some background objects around the scene to make it feel more natural but I didn’t have enough time.
Storyboard
Once I’d come up with the initial idea of what I wanted to do, I sketched a plan so it would be easier for me to visualize what I was doing as I went along. I found this really helpful, as it gave my workflow a proper structure.
Process
I began by modelling the character and some of the props. I used Maya for the hard surface models and ZBrush for the organic models.
Since I was animating the character, I had to make sure the character had clean topology so I used 3DCoat for retopology. I also created the UVs here, making sure that the seam lines wouldn’t be visible.
I used Substance Painter to paint the textures onto the models, building up the colour using different layers stacked on top of each other.
I found rigging the character very challenging as this was my first time doing it. After trying lots of different methods, I finally got results that I was happy with.
I split the whole project into different scenes so I could focus on one part at a time. I enjoyed animating in Maya and I’m pleased with how it turned out.
I would have liked to spend more time on setting up the lighting and modelling more background objects to build up the scene, but I was running out of time by this point so I had to start rendering it.
I used Premiere Pro to compile the scenes, adding sounds that I had recorded to bring the film to life.