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Happy Easter

Happy Easter Short Film Banner

General Project Details

Role:

Character Designer, Concept Artist, Animator, Renderer

Team Members:

Amena Salman, Erin Teply, Anmol Jindal

Tools:

Tools: Maya, Blender

Elapsed Time:

4 months (September 2021 - December 2021)

Goal:

2-minute original Short Film

Overview

Happy Easter, Figure 1, is a short film that I created as a part of a team of four for an animation course. The short film follows the Easter Bunny on their annual day trip to hide eggs, receiving an unexpected visitor in the form of a chick that hatches in their basket. While I occupied many roles throughout the project, the most prominent was my role as the character designer.

Figure 1. Happy Easter Short Film

Character Design

Moodboard for the easter bunny design
Figure 2. Character moodboard for Easter Bunny with images of features to guide the character design.
Character design sheet for easter bunny
Figure 3. Character design sheet for the Easter Bunny showing character in T-pose for modeling, and variety of poses to convey potential expressions of character.

The design of the characters began collectively in a group ideation session about the art direction of the film which resulted in characters' mood boards such as Figure 2. The design needed to be simple enough to adhere to a relatively low-polygon aesthetic while being able to retain a high degree of emotiveness that could be communicated without dialogue. With this in mind, I then synthesized the different aspects of the mood board that we discussed into the initial character sheets such as Figure 3.

Using Autodesk's Maya, I modelled the characters according to the character sheet (Figure 4), rigged (Figure 5), and UV unwrapped (Figure 6) to create a diffuse map for the characters. Further texture details, such as displacement maps for the appearance of fur, were created in Blender where the film was eventually rendered.

Easter bunny model in Maya
Figure 4. Easter Bunny character model in T-pose in Maya viewport compared to the character design sheet.
Chick Model's rig in Maya with hierarchy viewable
Figure 5. Chick character model's rig with outlined hierarchy, joint structure, and skinned pose.
Easter Bunny's UVs unwrapped and seen on the diffuse texture map.
Figure 6. Easter Bunny's diffuse texture map with overlay of model's UV unwrap.

Rigging and Weight Painting

The most challenging portion of the character creation process was the weight painting portion of rigging the character. My unfamiliarity with the process of weight painting for rigging led to me being very surprised by the distortions that the rig had on the model, as seen in Figure 7. Through trial and error, I was slowly able to scale and adjust the influence of the joints of the rig on the model so that it would be suitable for all the angles in the film such as in Figure 8. If I were allowed to redo this project, I would go back and research more of the theory behind weight painting so that the result is more consistent.

First Iteration Grasshopper Pavilion Models
Figure 7. Easter Bunny's skinned model with distortion around hip joint while bending forward due to weighting issues.
Iterations of Pavilion to Determine Light Paths
Figure 8. Shot of the Easter Bunny bending down to pet the Chick. The angle of the shot obscures the weighting issue seen in Figure 7.

Reflection

For me, this project was very successful. This project was my first opportunity to apply my theoretical understanding of the 3D animation workflow and experience dealing with some of the challenges inherent to the process that I would have otherwise would have not encountered without it.

Additional Information

If you would like to learn more about this specific project, below are some additional resources.