Plushie Pals
3D Animation Pipeline, Maya, Arnold
2023.01 - 2023.05
Overview
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Plushie Pals was a team project I did for a class I took at CMU ETC, Advanced Pipeline in Films and Game Arts. It is a 3D animated render pipeline based on Maya and Arnold.
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The animation tells the story of a young boy who spends his birthday with his plush toy, who quietly becomes a monster and steals the cake.
My Role​
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Environment Artist
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Look Dev Designer
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​Lighting Artist
Team
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6 People
Platform
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Maya
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ZBrush
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Substance Painter
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Arnold
Created
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3.5 Months
Development Process
​Environment Models
I used Maya to model the kitchen and the living room of the apartment as the place where our story takes place.
I also used ZBrush to sculpt some of the important models, such as tables, chairs, etc. and baked the sculpted high model onto the low model in SP.
Textures
I used Substance Painter to paint all the textures for the entire environment. Considering the needs of the story, I purposely made the textures of furnitures older and with signs of use.
Look Dev & Arnold Light
Since the animation involves complex character animation and hair, we finally decided to implement pipeline rendering in Arnold.
I experimented with ambient lighting and area lighting in Maya to make the environment look more realistic. For example:
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Added a weak area light outside the window to simulate the light outside the house and the moonlight;
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A downward light source was added to the inside of the range hood to simulate the hood light;
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Add an area light above and below the floor lamp to restore the lighting of the floor lamp etc.