Concepting

The character concept of the skeleton is based on a rough drawing I found in a sketchbook of my youth. The character also was used in a short 2D animation I did when I learned the basics of Adobe Animate during my third semester in San Diego. The result can be seen HERE.

With this university project work, I finally took the chance to translate my old friend into 3D, which was a really nice and challenging experience for me. Nearly the whole project, including the modelling, animating and rendering part, was accomplished in Maya 2018.

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3D Realization

A huge inspiration for the 3D model and later for the walk cycle, was Pixar´s movie Coco, which aired in fall 2017. The awesome design of the numerous skeleton characters in the movie most notably influenced the shape of the cheeks during the head modelling process.

For the shading of the character and the bass box, I used defuse-, normal-, roughness- and metallic-maps to create a high-detailed look. The textures were first painted in Substance Painter and then polished and refined in Adobe Photoshop.

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The Walk-Cycle

The animation process of the skeleton was especially exciting for me, because until now I have only created quite simple animations in the three-dimensional space. I would never have thought that a simple walk cycle could be so complex, but I am still quite satisfied with the result.

Click on the image below to see a GIF of the finished walk-cycle

For an in-depth look of the skeleton, use the Sketchfab Model Inspector

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The Final Shortfilm

The realization of the final short film at the end was another challenge, as especially the rendering of the different render passes with the help of the Arnold Renderer and the subsequent compositing in After Effects proved to be more complex than originally assumed. Nevertheless, the finished short video has become quite funny in my opinion and will always remain in my memory as my first real 3D animation film.