Bachelor Project
Full CG-Musicvideo
Info
For my last project as a student of “Virtual Design” I decided to create a unique, full CG music-video, featuring my Bands song “Border”.
Main intention was to represent the songs overall message, to follow your dreams regardless of how hard the way to the goal might be.
This project was a massive workload, especially working on it all by myself, covering all aspects from base-idea to storyboard via modeling/rigging/motion capturing, scene creation, postproduction to the final product (which can be found at the bottom of this site)
The idea behind this stylised-cel-shady look developed long before I started to work on this project and is related to our artworks in CD-Booklets, Tshirts etc. Same counts for the ape-characters, which are based on our band-mascot, “Captain Banana” a gorilla character.
Client
Bachelor-project (2016)
Field of work
Modeling, Character Design, Environment Design, Storytelling, KeyframeAnimation, Motion Capturing, Sculpting, Texturing/Shading, Rigging/Skinning, PostProduction, SoundDesign, CrowdCreation, Tons of patience
Software
3DS Max 2016, Photoshop CC, Unity 3D, Substance Painter, MotionBuilder, After Effects CC, ZBrush, Marvelous Designer, Audacity, Golaem Crowd, Maya
Character-creation
The characterdesign was one of the most creative aspects of the whole production, representing the whole band as caricated-ape characters. Luckily every individual musician features a pretty unique style in real-life (according to hairstyle, piercings, tattoos and clothing), which made the process a lot easier.
As a basic startoff for the first characters I created (guitarists and bassist) I used a basic “free-to-use” monkey-model which I redesigned, oversculpted, topologised by hand, unwrapped textured and rigged/skinned. From that point I simply had to idividualise them to give them the look of their real-life alter egos.
Designing the drummer started off by using a human-base model and then followed by the steps from above. The vocalist, which was also the hardest one to realise, came all the way from scratch, staring as a simple box.
All the characters have multiple morph-targets, allowing facial animation.
The characters clothing is created in Marvelous Designer and then animated in 3DS Max. The creation process was relatively time-consuming infact everyone had to be satisfied with his caricature.
Environment and asset-creation
Creating the environment was a lot of fun. Knowing that I was working on my final study-project I tried to basicaly implement everything I worked on during my time as a student in some way. Having that in mind I was able to use numberous models from earlier projects such as guitars (as seen as in “Les Paul”), the Mustang and the bike outside the barscene and the dinosaurhead-trophy inside the bar (from the “ThrillRide” project) fust to name a few.
Furthermore I profited extremly from my experiences during my internship/traineeship at Faber Courtial, where I was taught to model extremly fast, efficient and (most important) procedural. Knowing how to use Railclone for example made it possible to create the stage from the festival-scene in less than an hour.
Motion Capturing
Bringing the musicians to life was by far the biggest challenge throughout this project. Knowing all the musicians have their own unique movements in real life plus the fact of a 7000frame song made keyframe animation almost impossible.
Working as a professors assistant at the local “real-time-lab” I had the opportunity to use our MotionCapture-System and was compfortable in the usage of it.
Needless to say that it was a stunning experience for all the bandmembers to jump into the MoCap suit, play their instruments and seeing a real-time point clound of them rockin out.