Animation & Compositing
Animation
Most of character modeling, rigging and animation is made inside Blender, and added custom cell shading materials to mimic the traditional hand drawn, paper cutout style animation. Modeling of main protagonist and supporting character started back in summer of late July 2023, and each characters took about two to three weeks of modeling and rigging.
Big scrap character began lately during the beginning of the fall semester, I used plasticity (CAD software specifically made for artists) to increase the modeling process. Which is not the proper way to model, but it turns out great.
Click on the Video to Watch Real-time Animation Progress
Editing & Compositing
Compositing the character animation and environment was simple. Instead of exporting the fbx file in blender, I experimented how to use USD (Universal Scene Description) file in order to import camera animation from blender to Unreal Engine. Conveniently, USD file was much easier than using the fbx file, which remembers the camera movement and physics used inside the blender (railcar track collapse).
Most of compositing and editing is done with using Davinci Resolve. It came with fusion composition, it allowed to use node to stack each image sequence on top of each layers. Character animation is rendered with transparent background, it allowed to use as a mask for adding shadows and lighting effects on characters, and also animate the shadows to match the environment.
