The Forest

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The Forest

Another day in the life of Heirvey, but what is he doing? Enjoying a beautiful and sunny day?
Cutting down some tree for the next winter?

With this project, I wanted to challenge myself to make a short video entirely imagined, modeled, textured and animated by myself. I sometimes found myself blocked by my technical skills, but I was able to find solutions to get around these problems and achieve the result I had imagined.

Through this Behance project I'd like to share with you all the steps of this project, both the results and the failures I had to face.

For a more impactful rendering, I wanted to have 2 different frame rates between the character and his environment. Heirvey is animated at 8 frames per second, while the background is animated at 24 frames per second.

Storyboard

/sketch on paper/

Modeling

/all the stuff/

My aim is always to mix realistic elements (like tools, objects or the environment) with a softer,

more clay-like style for the character

Materials

/all procedural/

Breakdown leaf material:

Sound Design

/Adrobski's magic tricks/

One of the aims of sound design is to define the identity and atmosphere of the visual it serves. Together, we came up with sounds that could be used throughout the project (theme, instruments, sfx). We chose a flute as the main instrument for the theme, to intensify the dreamy, lush forest aesthetic.

Special effect part

/breakdown of various sound/

To push the homemade aspect even further, we decided to record Heirvey's various voices and sounds ourselves.

Challenges

/best of failures/

The cloth simulation was my main problem on this project. It was such a pain to find the good parameters for the best result and to get what I had in my mind. Everything was done in Cinema 4D.

I spent a long time tweaking each slider in the simulation panel to find the ideal values. On some shots I couldn't get a satisfactory result, so I simply removed the shirt from the animation.

Environment

/Clay render and behind the scene/