designing the cat scene
this little animated scene took ridiculously long to finish, starting in 2017, and continuously tinkered with, mostly through 2020 and 2021
so i'm rolling back through old screenshots and notes, trying to remember how the process went.
i've long lost all the early sketches that lead to this concept:
after concept art has been finalised, the designing still continues in 3D. i'm better at reminding myself this nowadays, and not spending too much time on early sketches, i'll rarely spend more than a couple days on initial concept sketches now
the weird thing to get used to with 3D modelling, is it's always gonna be ugly for a while at the start of the process.
as opposed to 2D sketching where you can spit out a beautifully gestural thumbnail straight away (and then have to deal with translating that nicely into a cleaned up piece).
i love wasting time on bits that aren't even visible
jokes aside, the experimentation was still valuable and shaped the direction of the final piece. i did spend a lot of time playing with the forms at their most basic, which helped me find a better direction to steer it in in 3D, instead of trying to stick to the concept sketch
you can see what a huge difference, from blocking out the base shapes, compared to a few days later after all the fucking around and box modelling more detailed forms. i find it's always worth spending an uncomfortable amount of time ensuring proportions and shapes are correct before detailing it up (much like thumbnailing)
then i was trying to figure out what to do with the whole scene. i vaguely knew i wanted him hanging over a body of water, so roughly posed him on a greyboxed jetty (below is a link to a video).
one of the things i like most about making assets for 3D games is the challenge of making an asset look good from every angle the camera will be seeing it from. really time consuming, but real satisfying to have a fully self-contained little character
but having a locked off view like this does mean i can really "design to the camera" and tweak it best for that angle
you can see the cat's head is clearly not designed to be seen at a different angle
click here to see the silly first layout test
and then was trying to work out the framing and where the camera should be locked to.
a long fucking time later
it was a couple of years before i returned to this project again after this point, and by then i had a clearer idea of what i wanted the scene to look like : a lit interior casting warm light, rain outside, fish swimming around, and a windowsill that hanging low over water.
with a lot of doodling back and forth between posing greybox objects in the scene, playblasting and painting over it, i finally settled on this composition
and completely scrapped the neck fluff as you can see,
after roughly scratching out some "temporary" textures, i tried painting over at a higher res for a crisper texture, but it just didn't ever look as good as the scrappily done one at 512px size.
idk what possessed me at this point to also try and replicate the "jpeging" upscaled look, wanting the look of a 512px image at a 2k resolution, so spent a couple of days just stuffing around making photoshop actions (built up of mixtures of sharpening, unsharp, blurring, high pass, and finding edges, all the boring standard stuff). came up with nothing really interesting and ended up just keeping the small size texture file in the end.
things get fuzzier here, i was doing some of the animation in 2020, then some final stuff the following year, but here's some fun screenshots i'd taken during the process.
top down view of the whole scene, the water plane was also rigged and animated
gets a bit hectic between the rigs for the cat, the water's surface and edge, the fish, the raindrops, the plants, the windows, and also had to set up the cat's eyes following the fish.
back view, the "lit room" is just a sphere with it's normals reversed
even found the really rough plan of the raindrop rig, when i was initially trying to figure out how it could be done
holy shit i was glad to finally finish the damn thing, even with such long breaks in between working on it
