Project Spark was the first movie short I have ever made. It took about a year of hard work and a team of five talented artists who helped me with this thing.This was our team:
Conrad Justin, Poland. Director, Character Design, 3D artist, Environment Art, Animator.
Igor Puskaric, Croatia. Lead Animator and support 3D artist.
Draw it, make models, paint diffuse, add other maps, bake and refine.
Tools
For all aspects of design (from storyboarding, texturing, animation to modeling, light and simulation) Blender was our main tool. Krita andPhotoshop were crucial texture creation tools. Add-ons for Blender that we used were UVPackmaster, Mesh: F2, and Mesh: LoopTools, all of which are wonderful extensions. As for the media - we chose Sketchfab with all its pros and cons.
Sketches
I drew multiple sketches to determine the world and characters. When designing the theme and style of the movie I looked at the game Machinarium (Jakub Dvorský), the movie Howl’s Moving Castle (Studio Ghibli), and the Sketchfab scene Mechanical Trolling (Sy-kim) - absolutely lovely scene!. Drawings set the theme and style and made it easier to make props as well as whole scenes.
Blocking it out
Block-out (simple, textureless geometry) was the foundation of this project. It went through multiple iterations. The first version was still made before any concrete story was developed. It looked a bit like a bunch of nothing but it set the theme and style of the Martian junkyard. Quickly becoming obsolete, it transformed into something more linear and refined (imagine a path in a game level). The block-out revolves around (and determines) the path robot characters take. Story, objects and their topology, as well as texture resolution is directly influenced by that path.
Visual storytelling and atmosphere
Color, light, space and theme dictate the atmosphere of the scene. The viewer explores the scene on an emotional level through light, color and animation.It begins with the lazy morning in the small hideout. The cave transitions into darker and cooler tones, mysterious and magical. The skull in a sewer makes it a little bit spooky. Geometry and lighting lead towards a giant hatch, making the viewer feel anticipation. Outside there is space and air and happiness (yellow, bright, warm colors) full of energy and joy. The last part brings us into the dark and gloomy pit. Colors are dangerous, dark and cooler reds and magentas suggest the supernatural or magical.
Detailed geometry
After the block-out was finished, all models were separated into four main groups: Robots, Spark’s lair, tunnel, and outside. All model instance duplicates were placed on a large sheet next to the scene itself (image below). This way the team could work on particular models (without altering the scene itself) and it would automatically update their counterparts within the scene. In the end this idea was abandoned as it was faster and better to work within the scene, not outside of it. That is because distribution, proportion and arrangement of objects are more important than the quality of the individual assets. The overview wasn’t a complete waste - it proved useful when converting the scene into an asset pack.
I managed to create an asset pack with models from this project! Models in it are optimized and assembled in a modular way allowing for many different designs. If you are interested, check it out on my Sketchfab account. It'll be a great boost for us to develop future episodes of Spark & Bibi!
Animations (paragraph written by Igor Puskaric, our lead animator)
All this effort, that had been taken to ensure the theme, feel and the very mood of this imagined cute and clunky world, simply demanded from us to further complement and amplify that same vibe with an appropriate animation style. In general, animation is a huge portion of the design! Since every object radiates a certain flavor of presence in the world, so does its animated behavior. Here is where our inner child was set loose in the very best of ways! We went for expressive and stylised, rather than realistic and rigid, even though we did want it to feel believable, even if not strictly physically accurate. We went for playful moves that have their own mass, momentum and an obvious visual intention, as often as possible! All these aspects together, are what ultimately projects a unified, homogenous and consistent overall expression.
Thank you for reading! Good luck with your own interactive 3D movies!
