An alien world encounter with a robot

This group assignment was my first animation project, which was created based on the theme of ‘Journey’. The story explores how an alien race living on a luscious, organic planet struggle to accept a robot which has crash landed on the planet. For this project, I worked on the modelling, rigging and texturing of one of the characters, the creation of the 2D and 3D environmental assets, and the animation of a sequence, using both my own assets and the rigged assets from the other group members. While I predominantly work in 3D, working in both 2D and 3D for this project was important in establishing our painterly visual style.

As each group member worked on a different character, it was important for the 3 alien characters to appear visually consistent. When modelling my character I kept key designs shared between the aliens in mind, such as the leaf on the head of the character and the spherical hands disconnected from the body. The narrative is lighthearted, so the character’s design needed to be stylised and cute, so I focused on giving the character large features using simple shapes.

The character was rigged from scratch, including shape keys for facial expressions. Controllers were also used to ensure that the rig was easily understandable and accessible for the other members of the group.

I worked on both the 2D and 3D assets for the environment for this project.

The 2D assets were drawn with in Procreate using a paintbrush style brush, to create a illustrative effect. For both the 2D and 3D assets, I used predominantly green, blue, purple and pink tones to create visual cohesion and to make the alien world look distinct from reality.

For the 3D assets, to make them feel fantastical, I worked with emission to create bioluminescent orbs which grow from the trees instead of leaves. This was able to make the 3D assets stand out from the 2D assets, while also working as a way to add a glow to the scene.

As the characters in this animation didn’t have legs, it was important to consider how the characters would be able to move realistically. Due to the characters looking like mushrooms, with a top-heavy build, I had the idea to have the characters jump, while swinging their heads to give momentum. As the characters were jumping instead of walking, it was important to ensure that the animation matched the distance covered, and that the body was leaning and stretching out appropriately.