- Mighty Giant: Season's Greetings Campaign 2019 -
Brief
I worked with Mighty Giant to help them transform a short story into a 3D animation for a global manufacturing company. The story focussed on two gingerbread characters being reunited, and the animation was to be used as a 'Seasons Greetings' message.
I was supplied with a 2D animatic to work from, created by our inhouse illustrator, which highlighted character expressions, actions, environments, lighting and shot durations. They also supplied me with character illustrations to be used as reference material.
As the 'Lead 3D', my role included:
- overseeing the 3D pipeline,
- creating and animating the opening sequence in 3D,
- creating and animating the gingerbread characters in 3D.
- overseeing the 3D pipeline,
- creating and animating the opening sequence in 3D,
- creating and animating the gingerbread characters in 3D.
Approach
I started with the gingerbread man, since it was going to be the main focal point throughout the film. I could then recycle the process used to create the gingerbread man to create the gingerbread lady. Once the characters were created, I could move onto creating the opening scene.
Working in this order means that the non-animated characters can be used as placeholders throughout the animation as soon as possible. These characters would later be updated with animated versions.
Making the Gingerbread Characters
I took a rather excessive (and personal) approach to creating these. My mum used to bake gingerbread for a living, and I wanted to get accurate real-world visual references. So I asked if she'd be able to help me bake a couple of gingerbread characters, and she was more than happy to help*!
*she 100% did the baking part for me.
I created cut-out stencils from the outlines of the character illustrations, to be used for cutting out the gingerbread characters. After creating a few copies of each gingerbread character, they were sent to the oven to bake.
Above: Photo being broken down into textures. Unsure why, but Behance has decided to alter the white balance...
The gingerbread characters were then photographed, and then broken down into different textures (with the use of Photoshop) to be used later on.
Modelling the Characters
As I was baking gingerbread characters, I was also working on the 3D model (there wasn't a specific order of operation here).
Remember how I created the cut-out stencil? I used a similar approach to create the base 3D mesh: I created splines along the outlines of the character illustrations, and then extruded them.
From there, I made the meshes editable, and sent them to ZBrush to bash them up a bit.
Left: Before being bashed around in ZBrush.
Right: After being bashed around in ZBrush.
Right: After being bashed around in ZBrush.
Now I had most of the pieces of the gingerbread characters prepared, I just had to create the remaining assets (i.e. the icing and sweets stuck on them). There wasn't anything special in creating these, so I won't bore you with the details and will move onto the environment.
Building the Opening Scene
The scene consisted of: a wooden table top, a metal cooling rack, a hand, and the gingerbread man. The scene was lit with a HDRI and spot light. I added some flour to the wood texture, and scratches to the metal cooling rack.
The cooling rack was built with C4D's volume builder (I could've also used zBrush's dynamesh feature, but felt it wasn't necessary). This allowed for the wires on the cooling rack to weld together.
Take the gingerbread mesh from earlier, along with the gingerbread textures, and the opening scene, and you get this:
Animating the Opening Scene
The icing animations were created with the use of volume builders.
The rest of the animation used constraints, a rigged hand and simple transform animations.
The rest of the animation used constraints, a rigged hand and simple transform animations.
Animating the Characters
I created static meshes of each of the facial expressions for both characters, and then simply switched on/off the visibility of those expressions.
It was quite tricky getting a character's head to turn without their neck collapsing.
I ended up using 'Bend' deformers to drive the body movement.
I ended up using 'Bend' deformers to drive the body movement.
Rendering
The final piece was rendered with Redshift, and then passed to the compositor to add the finishing touches.
More Information
Additional info about this project can be found here:
- https://mightygiant.co.uk/work/seasons-greetings/
- https://mightygiant.co.uk/blog/bts-3d/
- https://mightygiant.co.uk/blog/gingerbread-3d/ (written by yours truly)
- https://mightygiant.co.uk/work/seasons-greetings/
- https://mightygiant.co.uk/blog/bts-3d/
- https://mightygiant.co.uk/blog/gingerbread-3d/ (written by yours truly)
