Work Stuff! (Moths and Candy bars)

Yeah, yeah, we all gotta pay the bills- right?

Here’s some of what I do. As you can see, it’s much different from most of what I’ve shown you on here so far. What can I say- I’m a multi-talented lad…

These two shots are composed of a couple of things.

First off, the little moth dude is several hand-drawn illustrations (made by an outside illustrator). By several, I mean his wings and head are separate from his body, etc.

These are scanned in and computer-colored by the same illustrator. Then us animators get our grubby paws on them. Moohoohaha!

I animated his body swaying this way and that, and his facial expressions by tweaking some nifty little morphing parameters in AfterEffects. Just as a flat animation.

Then came the fun part! I first went to the store and bought me several candy bars. I know, rough job, right?

One to chop up and scan so I could see what the inside looked like, and one to build a 3D model of the outside. And yes, I ate both of them afterwards. Animation perks.

Here’s the inside of the bar, in case you care…

Then I made me a 3D model of the candy bar. Uh, like this!

My favorite detail on this- that little ‘blob’ at the spot where the bar meets the floor where the chocolate kind of spreads out a bit. This is basically just a box which has the ends tapered (you can’t see that part) and had some fractal-based noise added for those organic bumps like the real thing.

Then we add some little tiny bumpy texture on the chocolate and split it  in half and add the texture from earlier to the  inside .

Voila!

The lighting is this nifty volumetric 3D light, with a smidgen of blur added (the blur is based on the brightness of the image, so it gives it that nice ‘bloom’ effect to the lights.

And there you have it…