Somewhat Damaged

Hello,

I’ve been working on a short animation, it has been going on and on and on, as these things tend to do when they are not your day job. I believe I started this back at the start of 2015, so I’m over a year into it.

I came up with the idea after one of those life moment, I blasted Nine Inch Nails, Somewhat Damaged after it and while listening to it on repeat I was making up images in my head. Later I thought those images could make something that was both beautiful and disturbing if I could put it all together. I started by sketching out some ideas and writing down what I wanted in it. A year passed in which I moved to London, and then I decided I wanted to get started on putting it together.

After my last animation I wanted to push myself, a character/creature I wanted to try, my rigging skill up to now were more mechanical or environment stuff. Some more detailed props to get back to modelling which I hadn’t really done for a while(day job was rendering), and the other thing was to make something longer, with more feeling to it.

Here are some WIP shots of the things I’ve been working on so far.

This is the Centipede, the main character in the short, I went and chose the worst thing to have to rig. I’ve been struggling with this but making progress.

This is the tree that will make an appearance, these are test renders of the near final asset, I want to add some more details such as smaller rock around the bottom and in the cracks as well as some more minor roots. The lights are just the Modo standard cylindrical light, I’m also making a tube light, which will be the main lighting feature in all the scenes, I’m hoping this will bring everything in together in one consistent look.

The Machine, as I like to call it, this one is close to me as it resembles the pace maker I had implanted in me to save my life when I was a child(long story). This will be essentially a large scale object that appears out of a black liquid, once it has risen from the liquid it will come to life acting as a pump for the fountain(see below), I have begun rigging all the details, there is still much more to make and a detail pass to help give the scale, not to mention texturing.

This is probably the centrepiece, after the centipede this will be the next most seen asset in the short. The fountain started with 5 statues, I couldn’t decide on a strong pose for the final 5th statue so it now only has 4. I have made the sculpts in ZBrush, still refining them, have done a basic pass on the fountain structure.

There are more things to be made, some are in very early stage of their development, but all in all this project is starting to come together, I look forward to spending more time on it, and hopefully thats the case, be sure to keep a look out for some more WIP posts and in future I will start to document some of the processes that go into all of this.

Cheers,

Andre