| Contractor |
|
Eagle Eye Filmproduktion | ||||||||
| Format |
|
Animated Short (Teaser), 2 Minutes | ||||||||
| Credits |
|
|
||||||||
| Disciplines |
|
Pipeline, Modeling, Texturing, Shading, Rigging, Animation | ||||||||
| Software |
|
Blender |
Servus! The Wolpertinger [woibbàdingà] have always led a quiet, harmonious life – until humans settled around their idyllic oak tree. Can the Bavarian mythical animals save their home without being discovered?
The teaser was made using the Eagle Pipe studio pipeline. I was fully responsible for the characters (modeling, texturing, shading, rigging), set up the blocking for the whole project, and animated a handful of shots.
Shots
2.5d Projection
The establishing shot is a 2.5d plane projection with a smooth camera animation. I split Krita layers based on naming using a script, which created textured planes and spaced them out evenly. This way we could perform multiple iterations until the arrangement worked. The spacing was then further adjusted and additional touches – like the 3D-lit cobblestone and the procedurally animated leaves – were added.
Procedural Setups
The rigid character shapes combined with cartoony animation required a special setup for the arms. Since we needed to be able to position the shoulders freely without deforming the overall shape too much, I decided on a sliding mesh solution.
I managed to create a Geometry Nodes system that projects the arm socket (clay ring) mesh almost perfectly onto the underlying body, while smoothly blending UV maps and recalculating normals to match.
The arm itself required some sloped blending as well, so the connection doesn’t break when deformed.
The result: The object edge is almost invisible.
Stills
