My latest lockdown project,a collaboration with friend and music-multi talent ChePawsky who wrote the music in this clip.
Assets
Before the idea of the video, I just created the instruments as a single project, but with the desire to showcase them properly (after all, what are instruments without music) the project emerged. Obviously the video is heavily focused on the instruments being played, so except for the starting sequence, I didn't need many assets except for the animated spiral in the background and a few extras, like the gigantic record player they're spinning on and of course the rubber ducky with it's short cameo.
Shaders
I had been working on two custom post-process shaders for this work, the first was a hatch shader for the shadows.
This was supposed to be combined with my own version of the often seen cartoon-cell shade effect. For my works on the latter I learned most from underscore's cell shader tutorial as well as unreal's own tutorial.
This was supposed to be combined with my own version of the often seen cartoon-cell shade effect. For my works on the latter I learned most from underscore's cell shader tutorial as well as unreal's own tutorial.
In the end I dropped the hatching shader I have been working on. It looked good on stillframes, but the way I worked it, having it based on screen-space AO, was just too busy for animation. I haven't given up on it, currently trying to transform it to real-time raytracing AO instead, which should provide a cleaner and more static result.
The toon shader however, was further developed and refined and probably ended up the most comples shader I've made so far.
All of this was combined with a simple master colour blent with all the materials to get a consistent colour scheme for the 'monochrome' scenes of yellow or pink backgrounds with blue characters, having only the instruments remain their original colour to have them pop out more.
Characters
I am no character artist, but I obviously needed characters for this shot. The last comic artist I worked for (mentioned in my last post) already requested me to put characters in the shots I provided for him, the work with him was a lot more rough and production orientated, more like 3D sketches for him to work his magic on. Back then I came up with a fast workflow, using Adobe Fuse with some modification in Maya and posing directly in Unreal Engine. So I figured, why reinvent the wheel, when it worked last time. Again I adapted the models from Fuse, changing the textures and models to my liking and adding assets like the headphones. The animations were taken off of Mixamo and then customized in Maya and Unreal to fit the movement and hand placements for each shot, fitting them with the music. In the end in most shots there's not too much left of the original pre-composed animations.
