Stylized Animated Short
Gris-Markus Reinesberg, Raivo Rander, Timur Nizamov
Link to the project: https://github.com/Grisrein/Arvutigraafika-projekt
Full video is in github
Our goal
We wanted to create a short lowpoly stylised blender animation, where we aimed for creating an apocalyptic world after a war. Our goal was to focus on the ambience rather than the story, creating more questions about the world than the animation answers.
Style
We got inspiration from PS1 low-poly chunky graphics and tried to give it the same retro feel graphic-wise. For the story and ambience we were heavily influenced by the Metro/Stalker game series, so our animation takes place in an abandoned metro station.
Storyboards
During our first meeting we made a rough storyboard for our project, which gave us the idea for what models we have to create for our project.
Later we made a new storyboard which was quite similiar to the old storyboard, but featured better composition and ideas how to flow from one scene to the next.
Modelling
We had to create quite a lot of models, and this is the part that probably took the most time, as we had to learn while creating, later we realized we could have made a lot simpler models since we were doing PS1 graphics, but we are still quite comfortable with our models.
Texturing
The next step was making textures for our objects. To achieve this in PS1-like style, we first found pictures from the web and textured our objects using them with UV mapping. After that, we added voronoi modifiers to the textures.
Environment
After the models and texturing was done, we put them all together in the same scene, where the animation would take place. For that we created a tram station and started placing our objects inside it.
Animation
To move most object in our animation, simply moving and rotating them and using keyframes was enough, but we had to create a full body rig for the our main character, which was by far the toughest part of animating, as even without facial motion there are a lot of joints you have to move for even the most simple movement.
Issues with shadows
Sound design
Sound design was done in Reaper and sounds were taken from Soundly. Sounds and ambiences were layered and mixed together.
Shader/Rendering
To give our animation the "wobbly" effect that all PS1 games have, we used the PSX Vertex addon, which creates a huge box around the entire scene, and moving it causes a small wobbling effect.